Tolkien and the Great War
The Threshold of Middle-earth
John Garth

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.tolkien.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © John Garth 2003

Previously unpublished material © The Tolkien Trust/The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 2003

Cover: Tolkien and fellow students at Exeter College, Oxford, in June 1914

John Garth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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In memory of

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892-1973

Christopher Luke Wiseman, 1893-1987

Robert Quilter Gilson, 1893-1916

Geoffrey Bache Smith, 1894-1916

TCBS

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chronology

Maps

Preface

PART ONE The immortal four

Prologue

ONE Before

TWO A young man with too much imagination

THREE The Council of London

FOUR The shores of Faërie

FIVE Benighted wanderers

SIX Too long in slumber

PART TWO Tears unnumbered

SEVEN Larkspur and Canterbury-bells

EIGHT A bitter winnowing

NINE ‘Something has gone crack’

TEN In a hole in the ground

PART THREE The Lonely Isle

ELEVEN Castles in the air

TWELVE Tol Withernon and Fladweth Amrod

Epilogue. ‘A new light’

Postscript. ‘One who dreams alone’

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tolkien and The Great War

About the Publisher

Chronology

Tolkien on the Somme, 1916

6 June—Tolkien arrives in France.

28 June—He joins 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.

1 July—Battle of the Somme begins.

3 July—Tolkien reaches the frontline area.

6-8 July—With G. B. Smith in Bouzincourt.

14-16 July—Tolkien takes part in attack on Ovillers.

17 July—He learns of Rob Gilson’s death.

21 July—He becomes battalion signal officer.

24-30 July—Trenches at Auchonvillers.

7-10 August—Trenches east of Colincamps.

16-23 August—Signal officers’ course, Acheux.

22 August—Tolkien sees Smith for the last time.

24-26 August—Trenches, Thiepval Wood.

28 August-1 September—Trenches east of Leipzig Salient.

1-5 September—Support trenches near Ovillers.

12-24 September—Training, Franqueville.

27-29 September—Action at Thiepval Wood.

6-12 October—Battalion HQ, Ferme de Mouquet.

13-16 October—Headquarters, Zollern Redoubt.

17-20 October—Ovillers Post and Hessian Trench.

21-22 October—Capture of Regina Trench.

27 October—Tolkien reports sick at Beauval.

28 October—He leaves his service battalion.

29 October-7 November—In hospital, Le Touquet.

8 November—Returns to England on Asturias.

Maps

Preface

This biographical study arose from a single observation: how strange it is that J. R. R. Tolkien should have embarked upon his monumental mythology in the midst of the First World War, the crisis of disenchantment that shaped the modern era.

It recounts his life and creative endeavours during the years 1914-18, from his initial excursions into his first invented ‘Elvish’ language as a final-year undergraduate at Oxford, through the opening up of his horizons by arduous army training and then the horror of work as a battalion signal officer on the Somme, to his two years as a chronic invalid standing guard at Britain’s seawall and writing the first tales of his legendarium.

Travelling far beyond the military aspects of the war, I have tried to indicate the breadth and depth of Tolkien’s interests and inspirations. The growth of his mythology is examined from its first linguistic and poetic seeds to its early bloom in ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, the forerunner of The Silmarillion, envisaged in its beginnings as a compendium of long-forgotten stories of the ancient world as seen through elvish eyes. As well as a critical examination of this first foray into what Tolkien later came to call Middle-earth, I have provided commentaries on many of his early poems, one of which (‘The Lonely Isle’) appears here in full for the first time since its publication in the 1920s, in a small-press book now long out of print. I hope I have given Tolkien’s early poetry and prose the serious consideration they deserve, not as mere juvenilia, but as the vision of a unique writer in the springtime of his powers; a vision already sweeping in its scope and weighty in its themes, yet characteristically rich in detail, insight and life.

One of my aims has been to place Tolkien’s creative activities in the context of the international conflict, and the cultural upheavals which accompanied it. I have been greatly assisted, firstly, by the release of the previously restricted service records of the British Army officers of the Great War; secondly, by the kindness of the Tolkien Estate in allowing me to study the wartime papers that Tolkien himself preserved, as well as the extraordinary and moving letters of the TCBS, the circle of former schoolfriends who hoped to achieve greatness but found bitter hardship and grief in the tragedy of their times; thirdly, by the generosity of the family of Tolkien’s great friend Rob Gilson in giving me unrestricted access to all of his papers. The intertwined stories of Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, Christopher Wiseman, and Tolkien – their shared or overlapping vision and even their sometimes incendiary disagreements – add greatly, I believe, to an understanding of the latter’s motivations as a writer.

Although Tolkien wrote often about his own wartime experiences to his sons Michael and Christopher, when they in their turn served in the Second World War, he left neither autobiography nor memoir. Among his military papers, a brief diary provides little more than an itinerary of his movements during active service in France. However, such is the wealth of published and archival information about the Battle of the Somme that I have been able to provide a detailed picture of Tolkien’s months there, down to scenes and events on the very routes he and his battalion followed through the trenches on particular days.

It may be noted here that, although full and detailed surveys of the source material have been published for Smith’s and Gilson’s battalions (by Michael Stedman and Alfred Peacock, respectively), no similar synthesis has been attempted for Tolkien’s for more than fifty years; and none, I believe, that has made use of a similar range of eyewitness reports. This book therefore stands as a unique latter-day account of the experiences of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers on the Somme. Since my narrative is not primarily concerned with matters of military record, however, I have been at pains not to overburden it with the names of trenches and other lost landmarks (which often have variants in French, official British, and colloquial British), map references, or the details of divisional and brigade dispositions.

If nothing else, the phenomenal worldwide interest in Tolkien is sufficient justification for such a study; but I hope it will prove useful to those who are interested in his depiction of mythological wars from old Beleriand to Rhûn and Harad; and to those who believe, as I do, that the Great War played an essential role in shaping Middle-earth.

In the course of my research, the emergence of this imagined version of our own ancient world from the midst of the First World War has come to seem far from strange, although no less unique for all that. To sum up, I believe that in creating his mythology, Tolkien salvaged from the wreck of history much that it is good still to have; but that he did more than merely preserve the traditions of Faërie: he transformed them and reinvigorated them for the modern age.

So much has the biographical aspect of this book grown, however, that it seemed best, in the end, to restrict my comments on the possible relationship between the life and the writings to a few observations, and to set out my overall case in a ‘Postscript’. Having read the story of Tolkien’s experiences during the Great War, those who also know The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion and its antecedents, will be able to draw their own more detailed conclusions, if they wish, about how these stories were shaped by the war.

Perhaps this is the way Tolkien would have wanted it, if indeed he had countenanced any biographical inquiry into his life and work. A few years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote to an enquirer:

I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author’s works…and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest. But only one’s Guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author’s works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than any investigator), and certainly not so-called ‘psychologists’ [Letters, 288].

I do not claim any divine insight into Tolkien’s mind, and I do not pretend to put him on the psychiatrist’s couch. I have not gone hunting for shock and scandal, but have focused at all times on matters that seem to me to have played a part in the growth of his legendarium. I hope that this story of the passage of an imaginative genius through the world crisis of his times will cast a little light on the mysteries of its creation.

At all points, matters of opinion, interpretation, and exegesis are my own, and not those of the Tolkien family or the Tolkien Estate. I thank them, however, for permission to reproduce material from private papers and the published writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Many other large debts of gratitude have accrued during the writing of this book. First and foremost, I must thank Douglas A. Anderson, David Brawn, and Andrew Palmer for advice and assistance beyond the call of duty or friendship. Without their help, and that of Carl F. Hostetter and Charles Noad, this book would never have seen daylight. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Christopher Tolkien, for his generosity in sharing with me not only his father’s personal papers but also a great deal of his own time; his perceptive comments have rescued me from many pitfalls and have helped to shape Tolkien and the Great War. For their great kindness in loaning me letters and photographs of R. Q. Gilson, I would like to thank Julia Margretts and Frances Harper. For hospitably fielding my questions about Christopher Wiseman, and for permission to quote from his letters, I thank his widow Patricia and her daughter, Susan Wood.

David Doughan, Verlyn Flieger, Wayne G. Hammond, John D. Rateliff, Christina Scull, and Tom Shippey have all given me their expertise and insight on multifarious aspects of Tolkien’s life and work; the latter’s critical study The Road to Middle-earth greatly enlarged my understanding of Tolkien’s work. But for the help of Christopher Gilson, Arden R. Smith, Bill Welden, and Patrick Wynne, my discussions of linguistic matters would have foundered. Phil Curme, Michael Stedman, Phil Russell, Terry Carter, Tom Morgan, Alfred Peacock, and Paul Reed have all helped me to overcome obstacles to my understanding of Kitchener’s army and the Battle of the Somme. Thanks must also go to all those others who have taken the time to answer my endless questions, including Robert Arnott, the Reverend Roger Bellamy, Matt Blessing, Anthony Burnett-Brown, Humphrey Carpenter, Peter Cook, Michael Drout, Cyril Dunn, Paul Hayter, Brian Sibley, Graham Tayar, Timothy Trought, and Catherine Walker.

Of course, none of the above are responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation that may remain.

For help with archival research, I would like to express my gratitude to Lorise Topliffe and Juliet Chadwick at Exeter College, Oxford; Christine Butler at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Kerry York at King Edward’s School, Birmingham; Dr Peter Liddle at the Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds; Tony Sprason at the Lancashire Fusiliers Museum, Bury; as well as the staff of the Public Record Office, Kew, the Departments of Documents, Printed Books, and Photographs at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, the Modern Papers Reading Room at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Hull Central Library. Archive material and photographs have been reproduced with the permission of the governors of the Schools of King Edward IV and the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford. I am grateful to Cynthia Swallow (née Ferguson) for permission to make use of material from the papers of Lionel Ferguson; to Mrs T. H. A. Potts and the late Mr T. H. A Potts for permission to quote from the papers of G. A. Potts; and to Mrs S. David for permission to quote from the papers of C. H. David. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for other papers from which I have quoted.

For his meticulous copy-editing, his patience with my stylistic foibles, and his extraordinary fortitude, I must thank Michael Cox. Thanks also go to Clay Harper, Chris Smith, Merryl Futerman, and Ian Pritchard for their help and advice during the course of publication; and to the Evening Standard, for allowing me time off to complete this book.

Throughout, my newspaper colleagues have helped me keep it all in perspective. Ruth Baillie, Iliriana Barileva, Gary Britton, Patrick Curry, Jamie Maclean, Ted Nasmith, Trevor Reynolds, Dee Rudebeck, Claire Struthers, Dan Timmons, Priscilla Tolkien, A. N. Wilson, Richard Younger, and especially Wendy Hill have all provided much-needed support and encouragement at crucial points. Finally, I would like to thank my family – my parents Jean and Roy Garth, my sisters Lisa and Suzanne, my nephews Simeon and Jackson, and my niece Georgia – and to apologize to them for disappearing behind a pile of papers for two years.

PART ONE The immortal four

Prologue

It is December 16th, nearly the dead of winter. Chill gusts buffet the flanks and faces of the attackers struggling to advance across a bare hundred yards or so of mud. They are a ramshackle group, some of them mere novices. The minute these young men muster a concerted effort, a few veterans press forward with all their energy and skill. But most of the time there is chaos. Again and again their opponents shrug off the assault and land a fearsome counterblow, so that all the guile, fortitude, and experience of the veterans can barely hold back the assault. Their captain, J. R. R. Tolkien, tries to bring his own experience to bear; but those around him are, in the words of an eyewitness, ‘a beaten pack’.

The year is 1913: the Great War is eight months away, and this is just a game. Not yet soldiers, Tolkien and his team-mates are Oxbridge undergraduates back in Birmingham for Christmas, and today, in accordance with annual tradition, they are playing rugby against their old school’s First XV.

Just shy of twenty-two, Tolkien is nothing like the professorial figure now familiar from the covers of biographies, all tweed, kindly wrinkles, and ubiquitous pipe. John Ronald (as his old friends call him) cuts a lean, slight figure on the rugby pitch, but in his days as a forward in the King Edward’s School First XV he earned a reputation for dash and determination, and now he plays for Exeter College, Oxford.

His mind is a storehouse of images: memories of terrified flight from a venomous spider, of an ogreish miller, of a green valley riven in the mountains, and visions of dragons, of a nightmare wave towering above green fields, and perhaps already of a land of bliss over the sea. The storehouse is not yet a workshop, however, and he is not yet the maker of Middle-earth. But after a mediocre effort in his Classics exams this year he has taken a serendipitous stride towards it. He has said goodbye to Latin and Greek and is now tackling Chaucer and Beowulf, scrutinizing the origins and development of the English language. It is the affirmation of an early love for the Northern languages and literatures that will always fire his imagination. The first glimpse of Middle-earth is fast approaching. Far off in the unimagined future a cock crows in the courtyards of a city under siege, and horns answer wildly in the hills.

On the rugby pitch today, however, Tolkien is not at his best. He was meant to open an Old Boys’ debate at the school yesterday with the proposition that the world is becoming over-civilized, but he was taken suddenly ill and had to back out.

His other former First XV team-mates on the field have largely given up rugby since leaving school. Christopher Wiseman, tall, leonine, and barrel-chested, used to share the scrum with Tolkien, but at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he has had to stop playing rugby and rowing because of an old heart problem. Today, he is relegated to the less aggressive three-quarter line, near the back of the field and next to another veteran, Sidney Barrowclough. There are others here who were never good enough to play in the First XV against other schools, but all King Edward’s boys played a lot of rugby. For internal sports, the school was split into four groups, or ‘houses’; and most of those in Tolkien’s team on this December day once also belonged to his house. In truth, however, his team’s esprit de corps comes not from the rugby pitch, but from the old school library.

Tolkien met Christopher Wiseman in 1905. Wiseman, at twelve, was already a talented amateur musician; one of his compositions from about this time ended up in the Methodist Hymn-Book. His father, the Reverend Frederick Luke Wiseman, who headed the Wesleyan Methodists’ Birmingham Central Mission, had raised him on Handel and his mother Elsie had nurtured in him a love of Brahms and Schumann; his particular delight was in German chorales. But rugby was the start of his friendship with Tolkien. Both played in the red strip of Measures’ house (named after the schoolmaster who ran it), and partook in its bitter rivalry with the boys in green from Richards’. Later, they took their place in the scrum in the school’s First XV. But they experienced a meeting of minds. Wiseman, a year younger than Tolkien, was his intellectual equal and chased him up the academic ladder at King Edward’s. Both lived in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston: Christopher in Greenfield Crescent and John Ronald latterly a street away in Highfield Road. They would walk along Broad Street and Harborne Road between home and school immersed in passionate debate: Wiseman was a Liberal in politics, a Wesleyan Methodist by religion, and a musician by taste, while Tolkien was naturally conservative, a Roman Catholic, and (thought Wiseman) tone-deaf. Theirs was an unlikely partnership, but all the richer for it. They discovered that they could argue with an incandescence few friendships could survive, and their disputes only served to seal the intensely strong bond between them. In recognition of this, they called themselves privately the Great Twin Brethren. Even their closest friend on and off the rugby pitch, Vincent Trought, did not share this bond.

When Tolkien’s final term at King Edward’s arrived he briefly became Librarian. To help him run his little empire he recruited Wiseman, who insisted that Trought must join him as fellow sub-librarian. Tolkien’s place at Oxford was by this time assured and he could relax. Soon the library office became unsuitably lively; but the coterie that gathered there could afford to test the Headmaster’s patience because his son, Robert Quilter Gilson, was also in the thick of things.

All of Tolkien’s friends were capable of intellectual seriousness. They dominated every school debate and play, and they formed the backbone of the Literary Society, to which Tolkien read from the Norse Sagas, Wiseman expounded on historiography, Gilson enthused about the art critic John Ruskin, and Trought delivered a remarkable paper remembered as ‘almost the last word’ on the Romantics. By dint of their enthusiasm, this artistic little clique wrested school life from the hands of boys who would otherwise have controlled it. In the polarized world of school politics, it was effectively a triumph for Measures’ house over Richards’ house, the red against the green; but to Tolkien and his friends it constituted a moral victory against cynics who, as Wiseman put it, sneered at everything and lost their temper about nothing.

Much of the time the chief goal of the librarians was much less high-minded, however, and they sought only to incapacitate each other with laughter. In the summer of 1911, the hottest in four decades, Britain boiled in a stew of industrial unrest and (in the words of one historian) ‘the sweltering town populations were psychologically not normal’. The library cubby-hole became a hotbed of cultural stratagems, surreal wit, and tomfoolery. While the dead hand of exams laid hold of much of the rest of the school, the librarians brewed clandestine teas on a spirit-stove and established a practice whereby each had to bring in titbits for secretive feasts. Soon the ‘Tea Club’ was also meeting outside school hours in the tea-room at Barrow’s Stores, giving rise to an alternate name, the Barrovian Society.

In December 1913, though Tolkien has been at Oxford for over two years, he remains a member of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, or ‘the TCBS’ as it is now known. The clique still meets for ‘Barrovians’ and is still largely devoted to drollery. Its membership has always fluctuated, but Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson remain at its heart, along with a more recent initiate, Geoffrey Bache Smith. On the rugby pitch today, the TCBS is represented by all four, as well as by Wiseman’s fellow three-quarter-back, Sidney Barrowclough. But Tolkien is missing an excellent full-back in Vincent Trought. The TCBS’s first loss, he died nearly two years ago after a long illness.

The incentive for today’s Oxford and Cambridge players is social as much as sporting: what with yesterday’s debate, today’s match, and tonight’s dinner, this is a major reunion of old schoolfriends. It is this, not the rugby itself, that brings the highly sociable Rob Gilson to take his place in the scrum. (He also stood in at the last minute for the ailing Tolkien in the debate.) His passion is for pencil and charcoal rather than mud and sweat. It is hard to say which feature most clearly declares his artistic nature: his sensuous, almost Pre-Raphaelite mouth or his calmly appraising eyes. His chief delight is in the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, and he can expound with warmth and clarity on Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia. Like John Ronald, Rob is often busy drawing or painting. His avowed object is to record the truth, not merely to satisfy aesthetic appetite (though one visitor has noted sardonically that his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, contain only one comfortable seat, the rest being ‘artistic’). Since leaving school he has travelled in France and Italy, sketching churches. He is studying Classics but wants to be an architect, and anticipates several years of vocational training after he graduates in 1915.

G. B. Smith, with Gilson in the scrum, considers himself a poet and has voracious and wide-ranging literary tastes, from W. B. Yeats to early English ballads, and from the Georgians to the Welsh Mabinogion. Though he used to belong to Richards’ house, he gravitated towards the TCBS and he and Tolkien are growing ever closer now that Smith has begun reading history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a few minutes’ walk from Exeter College. ‘GBS’ is a witty conversationalist and delights in the fact that he shares his initials with George Bernard Shaw, the greatest debater of the age. Although he comes from a commercial family and agricultural stock, he has his eye on specialist historical research after he finishes his degree. But rugby football has never appealed to him.

Also in the scrum against his own better judgment is T. K. Barnsley, known as ‘Tea-Cake’, an unflappably light-hearted young man who frequently dominates the TCBS with his brilliant wit. Tea-Cake likes to affect laconic expressions such as ‘full marks!’ and ‘I’ve got cold feet’ and to ride with reckless enthusiasm around Cambridge on a motorbike, never mind that such behaviour hardly befits a future Wesleyan minister. He and Smith have agreed to play on Tolkien’s team only if Rob Gilson is there too. Rob calls that ‘a left-handed compliment’: in other words, they know his rugby playing is even worse than theirs.

So Tolkien’s forwards are fatally compromised by the inexperience of Gilson, Smith, and T. K. Barnsley. The burden of the fight falls to the defensive three-quarter-backs, including the veterans Wiseman and Barrowclough. Barrowclough shakes off a reputation for apathy by charging half the length of the field through the enemy ranks to score first one try, then another. But from early on after the first try, the pressure from their younger opponents is unremitting, and only adroit tackling by Barrowclough and Wiseman keeps the school’s lead down. At half-time the score is 11-5 to the school First XV. The teams swap ends, and with the wind in his favour Barrowclough scores his second try and the scrum-half again converts. In the final minutes, though, the school increases its score to 14-10. For all their camaraderie, Tolkien’s ragged bunch retires defeated.

But there is dinner with old friends tonight, and the TCBS is not prone to take anything too seriously. These are happy days, and no less happy for being largely taken for granted. On leaving King Edward’s in 1911, Tolkien wrote nostalgically in the school Chronicle: ‘‘Twas a good road, a little rough, it may be, in places, but they say it is rougher further on…’

No one has foreseen just how rough the coming years will be, or to what slaughter this generation is walking. Even now, at the close of 1913, despite growing signs that war impends for this ‘over-civilized’ world, the time and manner of its unfolding are unforeseeable. Before four years have passed, the conflagration will have left four of Tolkien’s fifteen-strong team wounded and four more dead – including T. K. Barnsley, G. B. Smith, and Rob Gilson.

Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War, one was killed. The losses from Tolkien’s team were more than double that, but they bear comparison with the proportion of deaths among King Edward’s Old Boys and among former public schoolboys across Great Britain – about one in five. And they match the figures for Oxbridge-educated servicemen of their age, the vast majority of whom became junior officers and had to lead operations and assaults. It has become unfashionable to give credit to Oxford and Cambridge, and to social élites in general; but it remains true that the Great War cut a deeper swathe through Tolkien’s peers than among any other social group in Britain. Contemporaries spoke of the Lost Generation. ‘By 1918,’ Tolkien wrote half a century later in his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, ‘all but one of my close friends were dead.’

ONE Before

If he had been a healthier child, war would have come upon John Ronald Reuel Tolkien before his seventh birthday. He was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, one of the two Boer republics that had won independence from British rule in South Africa. There his father managed a branch of the Bank of Africa. But Arthur Tolkien had come from England with his fiancée Mabel Suffield following shortly afterwards, and they had married in Cape Town. To the Dutch Boers in Bloemfontein they were uitlanders, foreigners, who enjoyed few rights and paid heavy taxes for the privilege; but the wealth generated by the region’s gold and diamond mines drew many to accept the deal. A baby brother, Hilary, was born in 1894 but the elder boy suffered from the torrid climate, and the next year Mabel brought both children back to Birmingham for a break. They never returned. In February 1896, Arthur died from rheumatic fever. So Mabel Tolkien and her sons were spared the harsh shock of the Anglo-Boer war which erupted in late 1898 over uitlander rights.

Safe in England, Mabel raised the boys alone, taking them to live in a modest cottage in the village of Sarehole, outside Birmingham. There she taught them at home during a four-year rural idyll, and the climate and character of this older world etched themselves in the young John Ronald’s heart: an utter contrast to what he had known until then. ‘If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you’re normally troubled by heat and sun,’ he recalled late in life, ‘then to have (just at the age when your imagination is opening out) suddenly found yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village…engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midland English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small, quiet rivers and…rustic people…’ But in 1900 John Ronald gained a place at King Edward’s and they moved back into industrial Birmingham to be nearer the school. Then, to the anger of Suffields and Tolkiens alike, Mabel embraced Catholicism, and for a while the boys went to a Roman Catholic school under the direction of the priests at the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien far outstripped his classmates and was back at King Edward’s in 1903, but he remained a Catholic all his life. After his mother, who had been ill with diabetes, fell into a coma and died in November 1904, he felt she had martyred herself raising her boys in the faith.

Prior to Mabel’s death, the family had lived for a while in rooms at a cottage in Rednal, Worcestershire, outside the city borders. But now their guardian, Father Francis Morgan of the Oratory, found accommodation for the boys in Edgbaston, and in their second set of lodgings, at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Bratt, a nineteen-year-old who also had a room there. She was pretty, a talented pianist and also an orphan, and by the summer of 1909 the two were in love. But before the year was over, Father Francis got wind of the romance and banned Tolkien from seeing Edith. Stricken but dutiful, he threw himself into his school friendships, the TCBS, and rugby, captaining his house team. He won a place at Oxford (at his second attempt) and £60 a year to fund his undergraduate studies in Classics.

Mabel Tolkien had communicated to her eldest son a taste for drawing. He used his first sketchbook for drawings of starfish and seaweeds. Another seaside holiday, at Whitby in 1910, produced evocative pictures of trees, landscapes, and buildings. Tolkien’s artistic response was aesthetic and emotional rather than scientific. His figures and portraits were at best comical or stylized, at worst rudimentary, and he remained modest about his abilities as a visual artist. His greatest strengths lay in decoration and design, exemplified famously by the iconographic covers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien had also inherited via Mabel a flair for calligraphy from her father, John Suffield, whose ancestors had been platemakers and engravers. Mabel’s own handwriting was highly stylized, with curlicued capitals and descenders, and crossbars slanting expressively upwards. For formal purposes, Tolkien came to favour a script based on the medieval ‘foundational hand’, but when he wrote letters as a young man he seemed to have a different style of writing for each of his friends, and later when drafting at speed he produced a scrawl resembling nothing so much as an electro-cardiograph image of a frenzied pulse.

Tolkien learned to read by the age of four and absorbed the children’s books that were then popular: Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, or the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, which irritated him; tales of Red Indians; George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, or Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, which stirred a desire for adventure. He particularly yearned for tales of dragons.

But fairy-stories were not the key to his boyhood tastes. ‘I was brought up in the Classics,’ he wrote later, ‘and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.’ By the time he was eleven, an Oratory priest told Mabel he had read ‘too much, everything fit for a boy under fifteen, and he doesn’t know any single classical thing to recommend him’. It was through the study of classics, and particularly through school exercises translating English verse into Latin or Greek, that Tolkien’s taste for poetry was awakened. As a child he had habitually skipped any verse he encountered in the books he read. His King Edward’s schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, tried largely in vain to spark his interest in the mainstream giants of English poetry, such as Milton and Keats. But the Catholic mystic Francis Thompson won Tolkien’s passionate approval for his metrical and verbal accomplishments, his immense imagery, and the visionary faith underpinning his work. Thompson, hugely popular after his early death in 1907, appears to have influenced the content of one of Tolkien’s first attempts at poetry, ‘Wood-sunshine’, written as an eighteen-year-old. Like Thompson’s long sequence ‘Sister Songs’, it dealt with a sylvan vision of fairies:

Come sing ye light fairy things tripping so gay,

Like visions, like glinting reflections of joy

All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief,

O’er this green and brown carpet; nor hasten away.

O! come to me! dance for me! Sprites of the wood,

O! come to me! Sing to me once ere ye fade!

William Morris’s use of verse in his pseudo-medieval romances was also to leave its mark on Tolkien’s own early poetry.

Morris was important, too, because of his association with Exeter College, Oxford, where he had formed the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with fellow student Edward Burne-Jones (himself a former pupil of King Edward’s School). Tolkien once likened the TCBS to the Pre-Raphaelites, probably in response to the Brotherhood’s preoccupation with restoring medieval values in art. Christopher Wiseman characteristically disagreed, declaring the comparison wide of the mark.

Mabel’s attempts to teach her elder son to play the piano foundered. As Humphrey Carpenter writes in his biography of Tolkien, ‘It seemed rather as if words took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant.’ He showed unusual linguistic propensities, in particular a keen sensitivity towards the characteristic sounds of different languages. His mother had started teaching him French and Latin before he went to school, but neither of these languages particularly appealed to him. At eight, however, the strange names on railway coal-trucks had given him a taste for Welsh. He was drawn to a different flavour in some of the names he encountered in history and mythology, writing later: ‘The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter, captivated me…and I tried to invent a language that would embody the the Greekness of Greek…’ That was before he even began learning Greek itself, at the age of ten, by which time he was also reading Geoffrey Chaucer. A year later he acquired Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary, which gave him his first glimpse of the principle of ‘sound shift’ by which languages evolve.

This opened a new world. Most people never stop to consider the history of the language they speak, just as they never ponder the geology of the ground they stand on; but Tolkien was already contemplating the evidence by reading Chaucer’s Middle English. The ancient Romans had recognized that some words in Latin and Greek sounded alike – akin, some thought. Over the centuries, haphazard attention was paid to such similarities in a growing number of languages, and wild claims had been made for the original ancestor of all languages. But in the nineteenth century scientific rigour was finally applied to the subject and the discipline of comparative philology emerged. Its key realization was that languages do not change randomly, but in a regular way. Philologists could codify the phonological ‘laws’ by which particular sounds had changed at different stages of a language’s history. Chambers’ dictionary introduced Tolkien to the most famous of all, Grimm’s Law, by which Jakob Grimm nearly a century earlier had codified the complex of regular changes that produced (for example) the words patér in Greek and pater in Latin but father in English and vatar in Old High German, all from a single unrecorded ‘root’. These (though not all) languages were demonstrably related, in ways that were open to rational analysis; furthermore, by comparing them it was possible to reconstruct elements of their ancestral language, Indo-European – a language from before the dawn of history that had left no record whatsoever. This was heady stuff for a young boy, but it would shape his life.

By the time he met Grimm’s Law, Tolkien had begun inventing languages of his own. This was partly for the practical fun of making secret codes and partly for sheer aesthetic pleasure. A pot-pourri of mangled classical words called Nevbosh (actually originated by a cousin) was followed in 1907 by the more rigorously constructed Naffarin, influenced by the sounds of Spanish (and so by Father Francis, who was half-Spanish and half-Welsh). For his final four years at King Edward’s, Tolkien was in the senior or First Class under the Headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, who encouraged him to look into the history of Latin and Greek. But soon his wayward tastes led him beyond the Classical world. A former class-teacher, George Brewerton, lent Tolkien an Anglo-Saxon primer, which he studied in his spare time. At school he excelled in German, winning first prize in the subject in July 1910, but by 1908 he had discovered Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language, and this long-dead Germanic tongue on the edges of written history took his linguistic heart ‘by storm’.

Others might have kept such recondite interests to themselves, but at school Tolkien was effusive about philology. Rob Gilson described him as ‘quite a great authority on etymology – an enthusiast’, and indeed Tolkien once lectured the First Class on the origins of Europe’s languages. Against the Classicist ethos drummed into King Edward’s schoolboys he played the outsider with verve. He combatively told the literary society that the Volsunga Saga, the tale of the dragon-slayer Sigurd, displayed ‘the highest epic genius struggling out of savagery into complete and conscious humanity’. He even addressed one of the annual Latin debates in Gothic.

The corpus of Gothic is small, and to Tolkien it presented a tantalizing challenge. He would try to imagine what unrecorded Gothic was like. He invented Gothic words; not randomly, but using what he knew about sound-shifts to extrapolate the ‘lost’ words on the basis of their surviving relatives in other Germanic languages – a linguistic method rather like triangulation, the process by which map-makers record the heights of landmarks they have not visited. This ‘private lang.’ was an activity he rarely mentioned except to his diary because it often distracted him from ‘real’ school work, but into the Gothic project he drew as collaborator Christopher Wiseman. The self-deprecating Wiseman later recalled:

Reading Homer with Cary Gilson sparked off in me what in Tolkien was already well alight, an interest in Philology. In fact John Ronald got to the point where he constructed a language L and another LL representing what L had become after a few centuries. He tried to inculcate me into one of his homemade languages, and wrote me a postcard in it. He said that I replied to it in the same language, but there I think he was wrong.

Philology was the focus of passionate argument between the two, and Wiseman said many decades later that the invention of languages was a cornerstone of their youthful friendship. That may seem a bizarre activity for teenage boys; but Tolkien did not think so, insisting later: ‘It’s not uncommon, you know. It’s mostly done by boys…If the main mass of education takes linguistic form, creation will take linguistic form even if it isn’t one of their talents.’ Language-construction satisfied the urge to create, but it also met the desire for an argot that would ‘serve the needs of a secret and persecuted society, or’ – in the case of the Great Twin Brethren – ‘the queer instinct for pretending you belong to one.’

It is unclear whether Tolkien shared with Wiseman another venture, the invention of an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, Gautisk, and it seems unlikely that the wider TCBS joined in his philological recreations at all.* But Tolkien’s motivations in language-building were artistic rather than practical; and even if his friends were not collaborators, at least they would have been a discriminating and appreciative audience. After all, these were boys who conducted debates in Latin – and took part in King Edward’s annual performance of Aristophanes in the original classical Greek. Tolkien himself played an exuberant Hermes in the 1911 production of The Peace (his farewell to the school). Wiseman appeared as Socrates and Rob Gilson as Strepsiades in The Clouds a year later. Smith alone of the TCBS, being from the school’s ‘modern’ or commercial side, did not study Greek; perhaps this is why he was relegated to the role of the Ass in one of the plays. They were directed by Tolkien’s cigar-smoking housemaster, Algy Measures, and the boys feasted on a curious menu of buns, gooseberries, and ginger beer. ‘Does nobody else remember these plays?’ one Old Edwardian wrote in 1972. ‘The grand parade of the chorus, clad in white vestments, down the full length of Big School playing on flageolets? Or Wiseman and Gilson munching gooseberries on stage as they chatted away as though Greek were their normal tongue?’

The TCBS revelled in a degree of outlandishness. Their humour was quickfire and often sophisticated; their interests and talents were many, and they rarely felt the need to draw anyone else into their circle. Another former King Edward’s pupil wrote to Tolkien in 1973: ‘As a boy you could not imagine how I looked up to you and admired and envied the wit of that select coterie of JRRT, C. L. Wiseman, G.B. Smith, R. Q. Gilson, V. Trought, and Payton. I hovered on the outskirts to gather up the gems. You probably had no idea of this schoolboy worship.’ In retrospect Tolkien insisted they had not set out to stand aloof from the ordinary King Edward’s pupils but, intentionally or not, they erected barriers.

On the rugby pitch, Wiseman had somehow acquired the title of ‘the Prime Minister’, and the TCBS elaborated this practice, with Tolkien as the Home Secretary, Vincent Trought as the Chancellor, and the acute and punctilious Wilfrid Hugh Payton (nicknamed also ‘Whiffy’) as the Whip. G. B. Smith, in tribute to one of his enthusiasms, gloried in the non-governmental title of the Prince of Wales. Furthermore, this was just one set of epithets out of a whole compendium.* In a note from Wiseman just before the TCBS coalesced, Tolkien is addressed as ‘My dear Gabriel’ and styled apparently the ‘Archbishop of Evriu’; the letter is signed ‘Beelzebub’ (perhaps to make light of the vast gulf between the two friends’ religious outlooks) and contains an entirely opaque reference to ‘the first Prelate of the Hinterspace, our mutual friend’. An air of playful pomp runs through their correspondence (such as it was before the Great War), so that instead of simply inviting Tolkien to visit, Gilson would write asking whether he would be ‘gracing our ancestral hearth’ and ‘making use of our roof-tree’.

Casting a critical eye on the era in which he too grew up, the author J. B. Priestley saw such wordplay as a sign of shallowness and self-indulgence in the ruling class, who were addicted to ‘a daft slang of their own (as they might have called it “a deveen privato slangino”), and…the constant use of nick-names’. The TCBS, however, hailed from the middle classes, a broad social spectrum. At the gentrified top was Rob Gilson, with his spacious home, his important father, and his aristocratic acquaintances; at the precarious lower end was Tolkien, an orphan in city lodgings. His ‘private lang.’ was no mock Italian; and while nicknames and mock-archaisms may have helped keep the Tea Club exclusive, they gently parodied the traditional social hierarchy.

Parody was the mode of Tolkien’s first published attempt at epic narrative. It was the natural choice, given that the piece was to appear in the King Edward’s School Chronicle. ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ deals not with war but with rugby, being the tongue-in-cheek account of a match in 1911. Its model was Lord Macaulay’s then-popular Lays of Ancient Rome, the source of Wiseman and Tolkien’s epithet ‘the Great Twin Brethren,’ and it is at least moderately amusing. In the guise of Roman clans it depicts the rival school houses, Measures’ in red and Richards’ in green, and it is full of boys charging around in names that are much too big for them. Wiseman surely lurks behind Sekhet, a nod to his fair hair and his passion for ancient Egypt. (Tolkien, it seems, did not then realize that Sekhet is a female deity.*)

Sekhet mark’d the slaughter,

And toss’d his flaxen crest

And towards the Green-clad Chieftain

Through the carnage pressed;

Who fiercely flung by Sekhet,

Lay low upon the ground,

Till a thick wall of liegemen

Encompassed him around.

His clients from the battle

Bare him some little space,

And gently rubbed his wounded knee,

And scanned his pallid face.

The archaisms and the illusion of combat give way to a bathetic contemporary cameo. The down-to-earth reality of the rugby pitch gently mocks the heroic pretensions of the literary mode.

The mock-heroism of ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ reflects, consciously or otherwise, a truth about a whole generation’s attitudes. The sports field was an arena for feigned combat. In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means. Honour and glory cast an over-arching glamour over both, as if real combat could be an heroic and essentially decent affair. In his influential 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt had imagined a soldier spurring his men through bloody battle by echoing his old school cricket captain’s exhortation, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ Philip Larkin, a much later poet looking back across the decades, described volunteers queuing to enlist as if outside the Oval cricket ground, and lamented (or exhorted): ‘Never such innocence again.’ A wiser age had depicted War as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but in the Edwardian era it was as if he were engaged in little worse than a spot of polo.

In the years up to 1914, the prospect of international conflict was often considered. Victorian affluence was ebbing away from Britain, struck by agricultural setbacks and then by the cost of the Boer War. But Germany, unified in 1871, was the braggart youngster among the European powers. Undergoing rapid industrialization, it was manoeuvring for a stronger role in Europe via expansion of its colonial grasp and saw Britain, with its powerful navy, as the prime opponent.

The coming war had cast its shadow on the worldview of Tolkien and his friends when they were still at King Edward’s. As early as 1909, W. H. Payton, an excellent shot and a lancecorporal in the school’s junior Officer Training Corps, had argued in debate for compulsory military service. ‘Our country is now supreme and Germany wishes to be. We should therefore see to it that we are sufficiently protected against the danger of foreign invasion,’ he declared. In 1910, Rob Gilson had called for an international court of arbitration to replace war. Tolkien led the opposition. He preferred traditional hierarchies, and for example he once (perhaps not entirely in jest) equated democracy with ‘hooliganism and uproar’, declaring that it should play no part in foreign policy. An equal distrust of bureaucracy, or internationalism, or vast inhuman enterprises per se, lay behind his attack on a ‘Court of Arbiters’. With the help of Payton he had successfully dismissed the idea as unworkable. They had insisted that war was both a necessary and a productive aspect of human affairs, though one schoolboy had warned of ‘bloodfilled trenches’.

The temperature had risen by October 1911, when the Kaiser’s sabre-rattling prompted the debating society motion ‘this House demands immediate war with Germany’. But others insisted Germany was primarily a trade rival. G. B. Smith claimed that the growth of democracy in Germany and Russia would curtail any threat of war, assuring the debaters, with his tongue as usual in his cheek, that the only causes for alarm were the bellicose Daily Mail ‘and the Kaiser’s whiskers’. The debating society did not declare war on Germany. Smith wildly overestimated the strength of democracy in both countries, underestimated the influence of the press, and failed to see the real danger posed by Wilhelm II, an autocrat plagued by deep-seated insecurities. Just two days past his seventeenth birthday, and making his maiden speech to the debating chamber, he can be forgiven for naïvety; but in none of these misapprehensions was he alone.

Despite industrial unrest, Home Rule agitation in Ireland, and increasingly militant suffragette activism, to many Britons the era was a time of material comfort and tranquillity stretching into futurity. Only the loss of Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition and of the Titanic, both in 1912, raised doubts about the security of such long-term illusions.

King Edward’s was a bastion of robust sportsmanship, duty, honour, and vigour, all backed up by a rigorous grounding in Greek and Latin. The school’s anthem instructed the pupils:

Here’s no place for fop or idler, they who made our city great

Feared no hardship, shirked no labour, smiled at death and conquered fate;

They who gave our school its laurels laid on us a sacred trust,

Forward therefore, live your hardest, die of service, not of rust.

There had been drilling at King Edward’s in the Victorian era, though nothing systematic; but in 1907 Cary Gilson obtained military permission to set up an Officer Training Corps as part of national reforms to boost Britain’s readiness for military confrontation. The OTC was captained by W. H. Kirkby, Tolkien’s first-year master (and a noted shot in the part-time Territorial Army set up in the same reforms). Several of Tolkien’s rugby-playing friends became officers in the corps and Tolkien himself was one of 130 cadets. The corps also provided eight members for the school shooting team, with Rob Gilson (an OTC corporal) and W. H. Payton excelling on the ranges. Though Tolkien was also a good shot, he was not on the shooting team, but in the OTC he took part in drills and inspections on the school grounds, competition against the school’s other three houses, and field exercises and huge annual camps involving many other schools.

The massed corps was presented to the king and inspected by field marshals Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Lord Roberts, the liberator of Bloemfontein. The school Chronicle concluded: ‘It is quite evident that the War Office and the Military Authorities are expecting great things from the OT.’ One midsummer, Tolkien travelled to London with seven other King Edward’s cadets to line the route for the coronation of George V. The year was 1911, and gloriously hot; he wrote at the time that it had ‘kindled an immovable smile’ on his face. But as they camped in the grounds of Lambeth Palace on the eve of the big day, a long dry spell finally broke, and it rained. ‘Adfuit omen’, Tolkien later commented: ‘It was an omen.’* The contingent stood facing Buckingham Palace watching troops pass up and down under the eye of Kitchener and Roberts. They heard the cheers as the king set out, and finally they got a close-up view as the royal coaches passed right in front of them on their way back to the palace.

For now, these military preparations were an occasion for high spirits. From one Aldershot camp Tolkien brought back ‘harrowing’ tales of the devastation wrought among the cadets by punning – inflicted, no doubt, by his own circle. He had returned from another camp, at Tidworth Pennings on Salisbury Plain in 1909, with a real injury, but not one acquired in action. With characteristic impetuousness, he had charged into the bell tent he was sharing with seven others, leapt up and slid down the central pole – to which someone had fixed a candle with a clasp knife. The resulting cut looked as if it would leave him scarred for life.

By the time G. B. Smith was cracking jokes about the Kaiser’s moustache, Tolkien was embarking on life at Exeter College, Oxford, where, in step with his generation, he pursued military training. As soon as he arrived he enrolled in King Edward’s Horse. This cavalry regiment had been conceived during the Boer War as the King’s Colonials, and it recruited men from overseas resident in the British Isles. As such, it enjoyed a dubious status compared to other British military units (and was the only one administered from Whitehall), but royal patronage had helped it grow; it had been renamed after the new king, Edward VII. The large numbers of overseas students at Oxford and Cambridge made the university towns prime targets for recruiting drives, and by 1911 the regiment had a strong following in Exeter College. Tolkien joined it, presumably, because of his South African birth: most new undergraduates enlisted in the university OTC, but those with a ‘colonial’ background were expected instead to join King Edward’s Horse.

Within the regiment, the Oxbridge squadron’s members were considered a fractious and independent-minded lot, but they had good mounts borrowed from the local hunts. Tolkien had a strong affinity with horses, which he loved, and became a de facto breaker-in. No sooner had he broken one horse in but it was taken away. Another would then be given to him and he had to start the process again. His membership of the regiment was shortlived, however. In July and August of 1912 he spent two weeks with the regiment at its annual camp at Dibgate Plateau, Shorncliffe, just outside Folkestone on the South Coast. The gales howling up the English Channel from the south-west were so severe that on two nights almost every tent and marquee was levelled. Once, the regiment carried out field manoeuvres after dark and, rather than return to camp, billeted for the night: an uncomfortable foretaste of life during wartime. Tolkien was discharged from the regiment, at his own request, the following January.

In the meantime, academic life at Oxford was relaxed, to say the least: ‘In fact we have done nothing; we are content with being,’ readers of the school Chronicle were told in the annual ‘Oxford Letter’ reporting on the activities of King Edward’s alumni. Tolkien was scarcely committed to the study of Classics. He was already known to old friends for his ‘predominant vice of slackness’ but now the sub-rector noted next to his name, ‘Very lazy’. Actually he was very busy – but not with Æschylus and Sophocles. He joined the college’s societies and its rugby team (though because standards were higher here he did not excel, and was regarded as ‘a winger pure and simple’). Ultimately far more distracting, however, was his burgeoning fascination with the epic Finnish poem, the Kalevala.

Tolkien had encountered this cycle of folk legend at school. He was ‘immensely attracted by something in the air’ of this verse epic of duelling Northern wizards and lovestruck youths, beer-brewers and shape-changers, then recently published in English in a popular edition. To a young man so drawn to the shadowy border where written historical records give way to the time of half-forgotten oral legends, it was irresistible. The names were quite unlike anything he had encountered in his studies of the Indo-European family of languages from which English sprang: Mielikki the mistress of the forests, Ilmatar the daughter of the air, Lemminkäinen the reckless adventurer. The Kalevala so engrossed Tolkien that he had failed to return the school’s copy of volume one, as Rob Gilson, his successor as King Edward’s librarian, politely pointed out in a letter. Thus equipped with all he needed, or was truly interested in, Tolkien barely used Exeter College’s library, and he withdrew only one Classics-related book (Grote’s History of Greece) in his entire first year. When he did venture in, he strayed outside the Classics shelves and unearthed a treasure: Charles Eliot’s pioneering grammar of Finnish. In a letter to W. H. Auden in 1955, he recalled that ‘It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.’ Ultimately it suffused his language-making with the music and structure of Finnish.

But first he launched into a retelling of part of the Kalevala, in the verse-and-prose manner of William Morris. This was the Story of Kullervo, about a young fugitive from slavery. It is a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic: Kullervo unwittingly seduces his sister, who kills herself, and then he too commits suicide. But the appeal perhaps lay partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair: Tolkien, after all, was in the midst of his enforced separation from Edith Bratt. The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too. An overriding attraction, though, was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism, and the Northern air.

If Tolkien had merely wanted passionate pessimism he could have found it far closer to home in much of the English literature read avidly by his peers. The four years before the Great War were, in the words of J. B. Priestley, ‘hurrying and febrile and strangely fatalistic’. The evocations of doomed youth in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) were immensely popular:

East and west on fields forgotten

Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

Lovely lads and dead and rotten;

None that go return again.

One admirer of Housman was the Great War’s first literary celebrity, Rupert Brooke, who wrote that if he died in some corner of a foreign field it would be ‘for ever England’. G. B. Smith’s poetry was tinged with something of the same pessimism.

Tolkien, through the loss of his parents, had already known bereavement, and so had several of his friends. Rob Gilson’s mother had died in 1907 and Smith’s father was dead by the time the young historian got to Oxford. But the lesson of mortality came forcibly home again at the end of Tolkien’s first vacation from university.

Back in October 1911 Rob Gilson had written from King Edward’s School to lament that ‘The passing of certain among the gods seems almost to have robbed the remainder of the light of life.’ No one had died: what he meant was that Tolkien was sorely missed, along with W. H. Payton and their waggish friend ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley, both now at Cambridge. ‘Alas! for the good days of yore,’ Gilson added: ‘who knows whether the T. Club will ever meet again?’ In fact Birmingham’s remaining members continued to gather at ‘the old shrine’ of Barrow’s Stores, and to rule the library office. Now the clique also included Sidney Barrowclough and ‘the Baby’, Payton’s younger brother Ralph. During a mock school strike they demanded that all overdue-book fines be sequestered to pay for tea, cake, and comfortable chairs for themselves. The King Edward’s School Chronicle sternly admonished Gilson, Tolkien’s successor as Librarian, to ‘induce the Library to…assume a less exhibitionary character’. But the club cultivated its conspiratorial air with sly ostentation. The editors of the Chronicle, and the authors of this admonition, were none other than Wiseman and Gilson. It was this issue which distinguished several of the prefects and ex-pupils as ‘T.C., B.S., etc.’ – initials that were quite inscrutable to most at King Edward’s.

Returning to Birmingham for Christmas, Tolkien took part in the annual Old Boys’ debate, appearing on midwinter’s night as the linguistically incompetent Mrs Malaprop in Rob’s extravagant production of Sheridan’s The Rivals with Christopher Wiseman, Tea-Cake, and G. B. Smith – who was now accorded full TCBS membership.

In effect, Smith was stepping into the void left by Vincent Trought, who had been struck down by a severe illness in the autumn. Trought had now gone down to Cornwall to get away from the city’s polluted air and recover his strength. The attempt failed. In the new year, 1912, on the first day of the Oxford term, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘Poor old Vincent passed away at five o’clock yesterday (Saturday) morning. Mrs Trought went down to Cornwall on Monday and thought he was getting better, but he was taken very ill on Friday evening and passed away in the morning. I expect a wreath will be sent from the School, but I am going to try to get one from the TCBS specially.’ He added, ‘I am in the most miserable of spirits…you mustn’t expect any TCBSiness in this letter.’ Tolkien wanted to attend the funeral, but could not get to Cornwall in time.

Trought’s influence on his friends had been quiet but profound. Grimly tenacious on the rugby pitch, he was nervous and retiring in social situations, and prone to slow deliberation where others around him devoted so much energy to repartee. But he epitomized some of the best qualities of the TCBS: not its facetious humour, but its ambitious and creative individualism. For in moments of seriousness the key members of the circle felt that they were a force to be reckoned with: not a grammar school clique, but a republic of individuals with the potential to do something truly significant in the wider world. Vincent’s creative strength lay in poetry and, the school Chronicle noted after his death, ‘some of his verses show great depth of feeling and control of language’. For instruction and inspiration Trought could draw upon the whole lush field of Romanticism. But his tastes were more eclectic than those of his friends, and deeply responsive to beauty in sculpture, painting, and music. He was, his school obituary said, ‘a true artist’, and would have made an impact had he lived.* In a later year, in the midst of a crisis Trought could not have envisaged, his name would be invoked as an inspiration.

About the time of Trought’s decline and death, Tolkien began a series of twenty or so unusual symbolist designs he called ‘Ishnesses’, because they illustrated states of mind or being. He had always enjoyed drawing landscapes and medieval buildings, but perhaps such figurative work was now inadequate to his needs. This was a changeful, dark, and reflective period for Tolkien, cut loose from his school and friends and forbidden by Father Francis to contact Edith. He had crossed the threshold of adulthood, and his feelings about it may perhaps be inferred from the contrast between the exuberant Undertenishness, with its two trees, and the reluctant Grownupishness, with its blind scholarly figure, bearded like the veteran academics of Oxford. More upbeat, bizarrely, was the image of a stick-figure stepping jauntily off The End of the World into a swirling celestial void. Much darker were the torchlit rite-of-passage visions, Before and Afterwards, showing first the approach to a mysterious threshold and then a somnambulist figure passing between torches on the other side of the door. The sense of a fearful transformation is remarkable. Equally apparent is that here was a rich, visionary imagination that had not yet found the medium of its full fluency.

Tolkien’s life reached its major personal and academic turning point a year later. Up until 1913 he had lived the mere preliminaries. He had been thwarted in love and it was becoming increasingly clear that in pursuing Classics at Oxford he was heading up a blind alley. Now all that changed. On 3 January 1913 he reached the age of twenty-one, and the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan came to its end. Tolkien immediately contacted Edith Bratt, who had made a new life in Cheltenham. But three years apart had withered her hopes and she was engaged to someone else. Within the week, however, Tolkien was by her side and had persuaded her to marry him instead.

By now, a year had passed in which Tolkien continued to neglect his studies under his Classics tutor, Lewis Farnell. A vigorous, wiry man with a long bespectacled face and drooping whiskers, Farnell was a fastidious scholar who had lately completed a five-volume opus on ancient Greek cults. Twenty years earlier, when Greece was still a remote and relatively untravelled land, he had been something of an adventurer, riding and hiking through bandit country to locate some half-forgotten shrine, or shooting rapids on the upper Danube. Nowadays his archaeological fervour was nourished by the rediscovery of legendary Troy and by excavations at Knossos that annually yielded more secrets of Homeric civilization – and an undeciphered script to tantalize linguists. But neither Farnell nor Sophocles and Aeschylus fired Tolkien’s enthusiasm. Most of his time and energies were expended on extra-curricular activities. He socialized with college friends, spoke in debates, trained with his cavalry squadron, and pored over Eliot’s Finnish Grammar. ‘People couldn’t make out,’ he recalled later, ‘why my essays on the Greek drama were getting worse and worse.’

He had one opportunity to follow his heart, in the ‘special paper’ that gave him the option of studying comparative philology. If he did so, he realized, he would be taught by Joseph Wright, whose Gothic Primer had so inspired him as a schoolboy. ‘Old Joe’, a giant among philologists, who had started out as a millhand but had gone on to compile the massive English Dialect Dictionary, gave him a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin philology. But Tolkien’s overall failure to apply himself to Classics, together with the dramatic reunion with Edith, took their toll on his mid-course university exams, Honour Moderations. Instead of the first-class result that Cary Gilson thought his former pupil should have achieved, he only just scraped a second, and he would have sunk to a dismal third but for an excellent paper on Greek philology. Luckily Farnell was broad-minded, with an affection for German culture that disposed him favourably towards the field of philological inquiry that truly interested Tolkien. He suggested that Tolkien switch to studying English, and made discreet arrangements so that he would not lose his £60 scholarship money, which had been meant for funding Classical studies. At last Tolkien was in his element, devoting his studies to the languages and literature that had long stirred his imagination.

Meanwhile, Tolkien’s friendship with the TCBS was growing more and more tenuous. He had played no part in a revival of The Rivals staged in October 1912 as a farewell to King Edward’s by Christopher Wiseman and Rob Gilson, and he had missed the traditional old boys’ school debate that Christmas, though he was in Birmingham at the time. At university, Tolkien kept in touch with acquaintances at meetings of the Old Edwardian Society, but very few Birmingham friends had come to Oxford. One, Frederick Scopes, had gone sketching churches in northern France with Gilson during Easter 1912, but Tolkien’s own funds were relatively limited, and evaporated in the heat of Oxford life.

At Exeter College, Tolkien had tried to recreate the TCBSian spirit by founding similar clubs, first the Apolausticks and then the Chequers, which substituted lavish dinners for secret snacks and consisted of his new undergraduate friends. He joined the Dialectical Society and the Essay Club, and enjoyed chin-wagging over a pipe. One visitor eyeing the cards on his mantelpiece wryly commented that he appeared to have signed up to every single college association. (Some of these cards were his own work, drawn with characteristic humour and stylish flair: among them an invitation to a ‘Smoker’, a popular social affair, depicting four students dancing – and falling over – in Turl Street under the disapproving airborne gaze of owls clad in the mortarboards and bowler-hats of the university authorities.) Tolkien was elected ‘deputy jester’ to the most important of these bodies, the Stapeldon Society, later becoming secretary and finally, at a noisy and anarchic meeting on 1 December 1913, president.

For the TCBS, however, the centre of gravity had shifted from Birmingham to Cambridge, where Wiseman was now at Peterhouse with a maths scholarship and Gilson was studying Classics at Trinity. The group’s numbers there were swelled in October 1913 by the arrival of Sidney Barrowclough and Ralph Payton (the Baby).

But at the same time, crucially for Tolkien, G. B. Smith came up to Oxford to study history at Corpus Christi. Wiseman wrote to Tolkien: ‘I envy you Smith, for, though we have Barrowclough and Payton, he is the pick of the bunch.’ GBS excelled in conversational wit, and he was certainly the most precocious TCBSite, already regarding himself as a poet when he took Vincent Trought’s place in the cabal. He also shared some of Tolkien’s heartfelt interests, particularly Welsh language and legend; he admired the original stories of King Arthur, and felt that the French troubadours had left these Celtic tales shorn of their native serenity and vigour. Smith’s arrival in Oxford was the start of a more meaningful friendship with Tolkien, a friendship that grew apace in isolation from the constant waggishness that afflicted the TCBS en masse.

In Cambridge, by contrast, Wiseman found his spirits failing under the relentless badinage. Rob Gilson attributed this depression to the health problems that had stopped him playing college rugby, proclaiming ingenuously in a letter to Tolkien: ‘We have managed to relieve his boredom at times. On Friday he and I and Tea Cake and the Baby all went for a long walk, and had tea at a pub…We were all in the best of spirits – not that Tea Cake’s ever fail.’ Wiseman found much-needed refreshment when he saw Smith and Tolkien that term, but shortly afterwards wrote to the latter: ‘I am very anxious to breathe again the true TCBS spirit fostered by its Oxford branch. Teacake has so fed me lately that I verily believe I shall murder him if he has not altered by next term…’

Happily for Wiseman, when most of the old friends were reunited to play their December 1913 rugby match against the King Edward’s First XV a few days later, he was well at the back of the field and T. K. Barnsley was in the scrum. But after another two months the ill-assorted pair, both Methodists, had to form a delegation from Cambridge to the Oxford Wesley Society. Rob Gilson came down with them and wrote effusively afterwards: ‘We had such a splendid week-end: “Full marks”, as Tea-Cake would say…I saw lots of [Frederick] Scopes and Tolkien and G. B. Smith, all of whom seem very contented with life…’

Tolkien had reason to feel at ease at the start of 1914. In January, Edith had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in Warwick, where she had now made her home with her cousin, Jennie Grove; soon afterwards Edith and John Ronald were formally betrothed. In preparation for the momentous event Tolkien had finally told his friends about Edith; or rather, he appears to have told Smith, who apparently passed the news on to Gilson and Wiseman. Tolkien feared that his engagement might cut him off from the TCBS. Likewise, their congratulations were tinged with the anxiety that they might lose a friend. Wiseman said as much in a postcard. ‘The only fear is that you will rise above the TCBS,’ he said, and demanded half-seriously that Tolkien somehow prove ‘this most recent folly’ was only ‘an ebullition of ultra-TCBSianism’. Gilson wrote more frankly: ‘Convention bids me congratulate you, and though my feelings are of course a little mixed, I do it with very sincere good wishes for your happiness. And I have no fear at all that such a staunch tcbsite as yourself will ever be anything else.’ Would John Ronald reveal the lady’s name? he added.

The English course onto which Tolkien had transferred a year ago was a further source of contentment. The Oxford course allowed him to ignore almost completely Shakespeare and other ‘modern’ writers, in whom he had little interest, and to focus on language and literature up to the end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. This was the field in which he would work – with the exception of his three unforeseeable years as a soldier – for all his professional life. Meanwhile ‘Schools’, his final university exams (properly the examinations of the Honour School of English Language and Literature), were a year and a half away, and for now he could afford to explore the subject at his leisure. He studied Germanic origins under the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, A. S. Napier. William Craigie, one of the editors of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, taught him in his new special subject, Old Norse, in which he read the Poetic Edda, the collection of heroic and mythological lays that recount, along with much else, the creation and destruction of the world. Meanwhile, the young Kenneth Sisam tutored him in aspects of historical phonology, as well as in the art of finding cheap second-hand books. Tolkien already knew many of the set texts well, and could devote time to broadening and deepening his knowledge.

He wrote essays on the ‘Continental affinities of the English People’ and ‘Ablaut’, constructing intricate tables of the familial words father, mother, brother, and daughter in ‘Vorgermanisch’, ‘Urgermanisch’, Gothic, Old Norse, and the various Old English dialects, demonstrating the sound shifts that had produced the divergent forms. As well as copious notes on the regular descent of English from Germanic, he also examined the influence of its Celtic neighbours and the linguistic impact of Scandinavian and Norman invasions. He translated the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf line by line and sampled its various Germanic analogues (among them the story of Frotho, who goes seeking treasure from a ‘hoard the hill-haunter holds, a serpent of winding coils’). He speculated on the provenance of the obscure figures of Ing and Finn and King Sheaf in the Germanic literatures. Tolkien was enjoying it so much that he had to share his pleasure. Giving a paper on the Norse sagas to Exeter College’s Essay Club, he characteristically thought himself into the part and adopted what a fellow undergraduate described as ‘a somewhat unconventional turn of phrase, suiting admirably with his subject’. (We may guess that he used a pseudo-medieval idiom, as William Morris had done in his translations from Icelandic, and as Tolkien would do in many of his own writings.)

A fertile tension is apparent in all this; a tension within philology itself, which stood (unlike modern linguistics) with one foot in science and the other in art, examining the intimate relationship between language and culture. Tolkien was attracted by both the scientific rigour of phonology, morphology, and semantics, and by the imaginative or ‘romantic’ powers of story, myth, and legend. As yet, he could not entirely reconcile the scientific and romantic sides, but nor could he ignore the thrilling glimpses of the ancient Northern world that kept appearing in the literature with which he was dealing. Furthermore, his hunger for the old world was leading him again beyond the confines of his appointed discipline. When he was awarded the college’s Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914, to the consternation of his tutors he spent the money not on English set texts, but on books about medieval Welsh, including a new historical Welsh Grammar, as well as William Morris’s historical romance The House of the Wolfings, his epic poem The Life and Death of Jason, and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.

For all his interest in science and scientific stringency, and in keeping with his irrepressibly ‘romantic’ sensitivities, Tolkien was not satisfied by materialist views of reality. To him, the world resounded to the echoes of the past. In one Stapeldon Society debate he proposed ‘That this house believes in ghosts’, but his idiosyncratic personal belief, nearer to mysticism than to superstition, is better expressed in a poem published in Exeter College’s Stapeldon Magazine in December 1913:

From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames, Standing in a vale outcarven in a world-forgotten day,

There is dimly seen uprising through the greenly veilèd stems, Many-mansion’d, tower-crownèd in its dreamy robe of grey,

All the city by the fording: agèd in the lives of men,

Proudly wrapt in mystic mem’ry overpassing human ken.

In its rather grandiloquent fashion (with a long line probably inspired by William Morris) this suggests that the enduring character of Oxford predated the arrival of its inhabitants, as if the university were meant to emerge in this valley. Here is an early glimpse of the spirit of place that pervades much of Tolkien’s work: human variety is partly shaped by geography, the work of a divine hand. Studying the literatures of the old North in Oxford, Tolkien’s imaginative faculties began to strain after the forgotten outlines of ‘mystic mem’ry’ which he believed had made the world what it is.

Tolkien wrote relatively little poetry before the Great War, and certainly did not think of himself as a poet per se, unlike G. B. Smith. In poems such as ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’, though, he took his cue not from the Anglo-Saxons so much as from Francis Thompson and the Romantics (Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ had inspired a drawing in 1913) and their search for a dimension beyond the mundane. Giving a paper on Thompson to the Essay Club on 4 March 1914, Tolkien depicted a writer who could bridge the divide between rationalism and romanticism, highlighting ‘the images drawn from astronomy and geology, and especially those that could be described as Catholic ritual writ large across the universe’.

The fairies of Tolkien’s early poem ‘Wood-sunshine’ may have been nothing more, on one level, than wood-sunshine itself: the imaginative embodiment of light dappling the leaves on tree-branch and forest-floor. Tolkien’s Romantic imagination, however, finds them more real than mere photons and chlorophyll. ‘Wood-sunshine’ may be seen as a plea to these ‘glinting reflections of joy / All fashion’d of radiance, careless of grief’, a plea from the mundane and suffering world for solace. Lightweight as this imagery may seem, it was linked to substantial themes. By 1914 Tolkien could formulate that link as a precept for readers of Francis Thompson, telling his fellow undergraduates, ‘One must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being’s harmony.’

Nothing as momentous as the events of the previous year seemed likely to befall Tolkien in 1914, and the year unfolded much as any other. When the Easter vacation arrived, his term as Stapeldon president expired and he handed over to his friend Colin Cullis, who had been a member of the Apolausticks and had co-founded the later Chequers Club with him. The Stapeldon spent much of the summer term preparing for Exeter College’s 600th anniversary: it failed to send out any of its usual insubordinate remonstrances to foreign powers because no ‘international affairs of sufficient importance had occurred’. On 4 June the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, was the guest of the university’s enthusiastic Anglo-German Club, which included Joseph Wright and Lewis Farnell, now the college’s Rector, or principal. Mrs Farnell found the prince oddly distracted until she mentioned the activities of the Officer Training Corps, about which he seemed eager to know as much as possible. The dinner, part of the celebrations of Oxford’s links with Germany, was just one of a spectacular outcrop of parties at the end of the summer term. Two days later it was Exeter College’s sexcentenary dinner, and Tolkien proposed the toast to the college societies (as befitted a member of so many). Then there was the ‘Binge’ for the Chequers Club, its elegant invitations drawn by Tolkien. Finally, starting on Tuesday 23 June, there were three days of social events marking the college’s 600 years, with a summer ball, a gaudy (a reunion for former members of Exeter College, or Old Exonians), a lunch, and a garden party. Some months later Farnell recalled: ‘All our festivities were enhanced by charming weather, and our atmosphere was unclouded by any foreboding of the war-storm.’

Term came to an end and so, almost immediately, did the old world. On 28 June, in the Balkan city of Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist fired a gun at the heir to the Austrian throne, fatally wounding him. International alliances were invoked and states stepped together into a danse macabre. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian empire’s friend, Germany, declared war on Serbia’s ally, Russia. A day later, fearing encirclement, Germany declared war on France. On 4 August 1914, to circumvent the heavily fortified French-German border, invading troops marched into Belgium. That day Britain declared war on Germany, having pledged to defend Belgian neutrality. Three days later, Lord Kitchener, now Minister of War, called Tolkien’s generation to arms.

TWO A young man with too much imagination

It is an icy day on the uplands of northern France, and to left and right hordes of soldiers advance across No Man’s Land in a confusion of smoke, bullets, and bursting shells. In a command dugout giving instructions to runners, or out in the narrow trench trying to grasp the progress of battle, is Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien, now in charge of signals for a muddy and depleted battalion of four hundred fusiliers. At the end of the carnage, three miles of enemy trench are in British hands. But this is the last combat Tolkien will see. Days later he plunges into a fever, and an odyssey of tents, trains, and ships that will finally bring him back to Birmingham. There, in hospital, he begins to write the dark and complex story of an ancient civilization under siege by nightmare attackers, half-machine and half-monster: ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. This is the first leaf of Tolkien’s vast tree of tales. Here are ‘Gnomes’, or Elves; but they are tall, fierce, and grim, far different from the flitting fairies of ‘Wood-sunshine’. Here is battle itself: not some rugby match dressed up in mock-heroic garb. Faërie had not entirely captured his heart as a child, Tolkien declared much later: ‘A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.’

Writing to his son Christopher, serving in the Royal Air Force in the midst of the Second World War, he gave a clear indication of how his own experience of war had influenced his art. ‘I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering,’ he said. ‘In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.’ The mythology ultimately published as The Silmarillion, depicting a time when Sauron of The Lord of the Rings had been merely a servant of the fallen angel Morgoth, arose out of the encounter between an imaginative genius and the war that inaugurated the modern age.

The tree’s development would be slow and tortuous. In 1914 Tolkien had barely begun working with the materials that would go into the building of Gondolin and Middle-earth. All he had was a handful of strange visionary pictures, some fragments of lyric poetry, a retelling of a Finnish legend, and a string of experiments in language creation. There was no sign that these things would ever be hammered into the mythic structure that emerged in late 1916, nor is the impact of war immediately apparent in what he wrote following Britain’s entry into the European conflict. This was a time of great patriotic outpourings among his contemporaries, epitomized by the elegant poetry of Rupert Brooke. G. B. Smith contributed to the flood with a poem subtitled ‘On the Declaration of War’, which warned its upstart enemies that England might be old

But yet a pride is ours that will not brook

The taunts of fools too saucy grown,

He that is rash to prove it, let him look

He kindle not a fire unknown.

Pride and patriotism rarely make good poetry. Tolkien, it seems, kept off the bandwagon. On the face of it, indeed, he appears just as impervious to influence from all things contemporary: not only friends and literary movements, but also current affairs and even personal experience. Some critics have tended to dismiss him as an ostrich with head buried in the past; as a pasticheur of medieval or mythological literature desperate to shut out the modern world. But for Tolkien the medieval and the mythological were urgently alive. Their narrative structures and symbolic languages were simply the tools most apt to the hand of this most dissident of twentieth-century writers. Unlike many others shocked by the explosion of 1914-18, he did not discard the old ways of writing, the classicism or medievalism championed by Lord Tennyson and William Morris. In his hands, these traditions were reinvigorated so that they remain powerfully alive for readers today.

A week after Britain’s entry into the war, while the German supergun known as Big Bertha pounded the Belgian forts around Liège, Tolkien was in Cornwall sketching the waves and the rocky coast. His letters to Edith reveal a mind already unusually attuned to the landscape, as when he and his companion, Father Vincent Reade of the Oratory, reached Ruan Minor near the end of a long day’s hike. ‘The light got very “eerie”,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes we plunged into a belt of trees, and owls and bats made you creep: sometimes a horse with asthma behind a hedge or an old pig with insomnia made your heart jump: or perhaps it was nothing worse than walking into an unexpected stream. The fourteen miles eventually drew to an end – and the last two miles were enlivened by the sweeping flash of the Lizard Lights and the sounds of the sea drawing nearer.’ The sea moved him most of all: ‘Nothing I could say in a dull old letter would describe it to you. The sun beats down on you and a huge Atlantic swell smashes and spouts over the snags and reefs. The sea has carved weird wind-holes and spouts into the cliffs which blow with trumpety noises or spout foam like a whale, and everywhere you see black and red rock and white foam against violet and transparent seagreen.’

But Tolkien was not eager to embrace the frightening new reality of war. Kitchener wanted 500,000 men to bolster Britain’s small standing army. In Birmingham the poor, manual workers or unemployed, were the quickest to step forward. Then British troops were driven with heavy losses from Mons in Belgium – their first battle in mainland Europe since Waterloo in 1815. At the same time, no regular army was left at home to defend against invasion. Now attention turned to the middle classes, and especially to young men such as Tolkien, without dependants. ‘Patriotism,’ thundered the Birmingham Daily Post, ‘insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation. ’ At the end of August the city looked to Old Edwardians, in particular, to fill a new battalion. Chivying them along was Tea-Cake’s father, Sir John Barnsley, a lieutenant-colonel who had been invited to organize the new unit. T. K. Barnsley tried to persuade Rob Gilson to join him in the ‘Birmingham Battalion’,* but the most Rob would do was help train the Old Edwardian recruits to shoot. By 5 September, 4,500 men had registered for the unit, enough for a second battalion and more, with Tolkien’s brother Hilary joining the rush. The volunteers, whose uniforms would not be ready for some weeks, were issued with badges so they would not be abused in the streets as cowards. Tolkien, who was not among the recruits, recalled later: ‘In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in.’ Meanwhile, casualties from Mons were filling the military hospital that had just been set up in Birmingham University, and Belgian refugees were arriving in England with stories of German atrocities.

With the public reproaches came hints from relatives, then outspoken pressure. Tolkien had no parents to tell him what to do, but his aunts and uncles felt that his duty was plain. Late in September, however, when he and Hilary were staying with their widowed aunt, Jane Neave, at Phoenix Farm, in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, John Ronald made it clear that he was considering carrying on at Oxford.

In many ways, Tolkien should have been predisposed to respond promptly to Kitchener’s call. He was Catholic, whereas the German invaders of Belgium were reputedly Lutheran zealots who raped nuns and slaughtered priests. He shared the cultural values that were outraged by the German destruction of Louvain, with its churches, university, and its library of 230,000 books that included hundreds of unique medieval manuscripts. And he felt a duty to crown and country.

But in 1914 J. R. R. Tolkien was being asked to fight soldiers whose home was the land of his own paternal ancestors. There had been Tolkiens in England in the early nineteenth century, but the line (as Tolkiehn) went back to Saxony. Ancient Germania had also been the cradle of Anglo-Saxon culture. In one of his notebooks that year, Tolkien painstakingly traced the successive incursions that had brought the Germanic tribes to the island of Britain. At this stage, as he later admitted, he was drawn powerfully to ‘the “Germanic” ideal’, which Tolkien was to describe even in 1941 (despite its exploitation by Adolf Hitler) as ‘that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe’. There was also the matter of academic fellowship. Germany was the intellectual fount of the modern science of philology and had hauled Anglo-Saxon into the forefront of English studies. That autumn, his old tutor Farnell relayed tales of German atrocities in Belgium, but Joseph Wright, who was now Tolkien’s friend and adviser as well as tutor, was trying to set up a lending library for wounded German soldiers who were being treated in Oxford. Such sympathies and society may not have been entirely forgotten, even under the glaring eye of Lord Kitchener on the recruiting posters. Though many of his countrymen who bore German surnames soon changed them to English ones (among them George V in July 1917), Tolkien did not, noting many years afterwards: ‘I have been accustomed…to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war…’

It is possible that his unconventional tastes in Germanic literature gave him a different view of war from that of most contemporaries. Embracing the culture of the ancient European North, Tolkien turned his back enthusiastically on the Classics that had nurtured his generation at school. They had become romantically entangled with Victorian triumphalism; in the words of one commentator, ‘As the long prosperous years of the Pax Britannica succeeded one another, the truth about war was forgotten, and in 1914 young officers went into battle with the Iliad in their backpacks and the names of Achilles and Hector engraved upon their hearts.’ But the names on Tolkien’s heart now were Beowulf and Beorhtnoth. Indeed, like the youth Torhthelm in his 1953 verse drama, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, Tolkien’s head was by now ‘full of old lays concerning the heroes of northern antiquity, such as Finn, king of Frisia; Fróda of the Hathobards; Béowulf; and Hengest and Horsa…’ He had become more entrenched, if anything, in his boyhood view that ‘though as a whole the Northern epic has not the charm and delight of the Southern, yet in a certain bare veracity it excels it’. Homer’s Iliad is in part a catalogue of violent deaths, but it is set in a warm world where seas are sunlit, heroes become demigods, and the rule of the Olympians is unending. The Germanic world was chillier and greyer. It carried a burden of pessimism, and final annihilation awaited Middangeard (Middle-earth) and its gods. Beowulf was about ‘man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time’, he wrote later in his influential essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’. ‘A young man with too much imagination and little physical courage’, as he later described himself, Tolkien could picture war only too well, if not the unprecedented efficiency mechanization would bring to the business of killing.

But the key to Tolkien’s decision to defer enlistment lay in his pocket. He was not well off, surviving on his £60 exhibition money and a small annuity. When he had gone to Cheltenham to win Edith back, on turning twenty-one, her protective landlord had warned her guardian, ‘I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured Gentl[eman], but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry, I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a Profession it would have been different.’ Now that Tolkien and Edith were engaged, he could not consider himself only. Having changed course and finally found his métier, though, he hoped to make a living as an academic. But that would be impossible if he did not get his degree. The much wealthier Rob Gilson told his own sweetheart eighteen months later:

He did not join the Army until later than the rest of us as he finished his schools at Oxford first. It was quite necessary for him, as it is his main hope of earning his living and I am glad to say he got his first – in English Literature…He has always been desperately poor…

So Tolkien told his Aunt Jane that he had resolved to complete his studies. But under the intense pressure he turned to poetry. As a result, the visit to Phoenix Farm proved pivotal in an entirely unexpected way.

Back before war broke out, at the end of the university term, Tolkien had borrowed from the college library Grein and Wülcker’s multi-volume Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie. This massive work was one of those monuments of German scholarship that had shaped the study of Old English, and it meant Tolkien had the core poetic corpus at hand throughout the long summer vacation. He waded through the Crist, by the eighthcentury Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, but found it ‘a lamentable bore’, as he wrote later: ‘lamentable, because it is a matter for tears that a man (or men) with talent in word-spinning, who must have heard (or read) so much now lost, should spend their time composing such uninspired stuff’. Boredom could have a paradoxical effect on Tolkien: it set his imagination roaming. Furthermore, the thought of stories lost beyond recall always tantalized him. In the midst of Cynewulf’s pious homily, he encountered the words Eala Earendel! engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended, ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men!’ The name Earendel (or Éarendel) struck him in an extraordinary way. Tolkien later expressed his own reaction through Arundel Lowdham, a character in ‘The Notion Club Papers’, an unfinished story of the 1940s: ‘I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English…I don’t think it is any irreverence to say that it may derive its curiously moving quality from some older world.’ But whose name was Éarendel? The question sparked a lifelong answer.

Cynewulf’s lines were about an angelic messenger or herald of Christ. The dictionary suggested the word meant a ray of light, or the illumination of dawn. Tolkien felt that it must be a survival from before Anglo-Saxon, even from before Christianity. (Cognate names such as Aurvandil and Orendil in other ancient records bear this out. According to the rules of comparative philology, they probably descended from a single name before Germanic split into its offspring languages. But the literal and metaphorical meanings of this name are obscure.) Drawing on the dictionary definitions and Cynewulf’s reference to Éarendel as being above our world, Tolkien was inspired with the idea that Éarendel could be none other than the steersman of Venus, the planet that presages the dawn. At Phoenix Farm, on 24 September 1914, he began, with startling éclat:

Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup

In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;

From the door of Night as a ray of light

Leapt over the twilight brim,

And launching his bark like a silver spark

From the golden-fading sand

Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death

He sped from Westerland.

Tolkien embellished ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ with a favourite phrase from Beowulf, Ofer ýpa ful, ‘over the cup of the ocean’, ‘over the ocean’s goblet’. A further characteristic of Éarendel may have been suggested to Tolkien by the similarity of his name to the Old English ēar ‘sea’: though his element is the sky, he is a mariner. But these were mere beginnings. He sketched out a character and a cosmology in forty-eight lines of verse that are by turns sublime, vivacious, and sombre. All the heavenly bodies are ships that sail daily through gates at the East and West. The action is simple: Éarendel launches his vessel from the sunset Westerland at the world’s rim, skitters past the stars sailing their fixed courses, and escapes the hunting Moon, but dies in the light of the rising Sun.

And Éarendel fled from that Shipman dread

Beyond the dark earth’s pale,

Back under the rim of the Ocean dim,

And behind the world set sail;

And he heard the mirth of the folk of earth

And hearkened to their tears,

As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack

On its journey down the years.

Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast

As an isléd lamp at sea,

And beyond the ken of mortal men

Set his lonely errantry,

Tracking the Sun in his galleon

And voyaging the skies

Till his splendour was shorn by the birth of Morn

And he died with the Dawn in his eyes.

It is the kind of myth an ancient people might make to explain celestial phenomena. Tolkien gave the title in Old English too (Scipfæreld Earendeles Æfensteorran), as if the whole poem were a translation. He was imagining the story Cynewulf might have heard, as if a rival Anglo-Saxon poet had troubled to record it.

As he wrote, German and French armies clashed fiercely at the town of Albert, in the region named for the River Somme, which flows through it. But Éarendel’s is a solitary species of daring, driven by an unexplained desire. He is not (as in Cynewulf) monnum sended, ‘sent unto men’ as a messenger or herald; nor is he a warrior. If Éarendel embodies heroism at all, it is the maverick, elemental heroism of individuals such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who that summer had sailed off on his voyage to traverse the Antarctic continent.

If the shadow of war touches Tolkien’s poem at all, it is in a very oblique way. Though he flies from the mundane world, Éarendel listens to its weeping, and while his ship speeds off on its own wayward course, the fixed stars take their appointed places on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. It is impossible to say whether Tolkien meant this to equate in any way to his own situation at the time of writing; but it is interesting that, while he was under intense pressure to fight for King and Country, and while others were burnishing their martial couplets, he eulogized a ‘wandering spirit’ at odds with the majority course, a fugitive in a lonely pursuit of some elusive ideal.

What is this ideal? Disregarding the later development of his story, we know little more about the Éarendel of this poem than we do about the stick figure stepping into space in Tolkien’s drawing The End of the World. Still less do we know what Éarendel is thinking, despite his evident daring, eccentricity, and uncontainable curiosity. We might almost conclude that this is truly ‘an endless quest’ not just without conclusion, but without purpose. If Tolkien had wanted to analyse the heart and mind of his mariner, he might have turned to the great Old English meditations on exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Instead he turned to Romance, the quest’s native mode, in which motivation is either self-evident (love, ambition, greed) or supernatural. Éarendel’s motivation is both: after all, he is both a man and a celestial object. Supernaturally, this is an astronomy myth explaining planetary motions, but on a human scale it is also a paean to imagination. ‘His heart afire with bright desire’, Éarendel is like Francis Thompson (in Tolkien’s Stapeldon Society paper), filled with ‘a burning enthusiasm for the ethereally fair’. It is tempting to see analogies with Tolkien the writer bursting into creativity. The mariner’s quest is that of the Romantic individual who has ‘too much imagination’, who is not content with the Enlightenment project of examining the known world in ever greater detail. Éarendel overleaps all conventional barriers in a search for self-realization in the face of the natural sublime. In an unspoken religious sense, he seeks to see the face of God.

The week before the start of the Cambridge term found Rob Gilson staying with Christopher Wiseman in Wandsworth, London, where his family had moved following his father’s appointment as secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Home Mission Department in 1913. It was also the week of the fall of Antwerp. Gilson wrote: ‘We are of course very mad and hilarious. Last night we went to see Gerald du Maurier in Outcast – such a bad play. I don’t know what we are going to do today and shall probably start to do it before we have decided.’ At the same time, on 4 October, the last Sunday of the long vacation, Tolkien was back in Birmingham, staying at the Oratory with Father Francis Morgan. T. K. Barnsley, who had now been appointed the first subaltern in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was leading the new unit in a church parade at the city’s central parish church. On the Monday the recruits began training. Saturday’s Daily Post had carried a list of men accepted to serve in the 3rd Birmingham Battalion. Hilary Tolkien was soon packed off without ceremony to train at a Methodist college in Moseley as a bugler.

Back in Oxford, Tolkien confided in a Catholic professor that the outbreak of war had come as a profound blow to him, ‘the collapse of all my world’, as he later put it. Tolkien had been prone to fits of profound melancholy, even despair, ever since the death of his mother, though he kept them to himself. The new life he had slowly built up since her death was now in peril. Hearing his complaint, however, the Catholic professor responded that this war was no aberration: on the contrary, for the human race it was merely ‘back to normal’.

Yet ‘ordinary life’, as Tolkien had known it, was an immediate casualty of war, even in Oxford. The university was transformed into a citadel of refugees and war-readiness. The time-honoured flow of undergraduates had haemorrhaged: a committee to process student recruits had dealt with 2,000 by September. Only seventy-five remained at Exeter College, and in the evenings unlit windows loomed over the silent quad. Tolkien was stricken with severe second thoughts about staying and declared: ‘It is awful. I really don’t think I shall be able to go on: work seems impossible.’ The college had become part-barracks, with areas allocated to Oxfordshire Light Infantrymen and batteries of gunners, who came and went in a steady stream. Some of the younger dons had gone off to war, and so had many of the college servants; older men had taken their place. Tolkien was glad to be living for the first time out of college, at 59 St John Street (an address which came to be known as ‘the Johnner’), where he shared ‘digs’ with his last remaining Exeter friend, Colin Cullis, who was not able to join up due to poor health.

The town was largely emptied of its younger men, but it was busier than ever. Women were stepping into men’s civilian jobs. Exiled Belgians and Serbs appeared. Convalescent soldiers wandered the streets and the wounded were laid up in the Examination Schools. The troops who were being trained to replace them drilled in the University Parks in their temporary-issue blue uniforms. Quaintly, as it now seems, Farnell the Rector was giving lessons in the épée and the sabre. For the first time since the English Civil War, Oxford had become a military camp.

Urged on by Farnell, Tolkien and his few fellow undergraduates strove to keep the college societies going. The Stapeldon Society, a shadow of its former self under ‘lowering clouds of Armageddon’, did its trivial best by passing a rousing vote of confidence in all Exonians in the armed forces and sending letters of support to King Albert of Belgium and Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty). But the first duty imposed upon Tolkien was to pursue the question of the redecoration of the Junior Common Room, the undergraduates’ meeting place. The students were warned that war would mean going short on such luxuries. The sub-rector told Tolkien that student entertainments were unduly wasteful and must be banned. Tolkien turned to humour, poking fun at the first-year intake for not taking baths, ‘no doubt,’ he said, because they were ‘economising with the best of intentions in this time of stress’. The society debated the motion that ‘This House disapproves a system of stringent economy in the present crisis.’ Tolkien spoke in a debate on ‘the Superman and International Law’, but his own proposal, that ‘This House approves of spelling reform,’ suggests an urge to turn aside from the war. It was a necessary appeal to non-martial life, but a puny one as more and more of the globe became entangled in war. At the end of October German forces in Belgium were driven back from the River Yser by flooding after the Belgians opened the seaward sluices at high tide, but at nearby Ypres British forces were succumbing to exhaustion in the mud, the new enemy. The opposing armies had failed to outflank each other and now began hunkering down in trenches: the Western Front had been established. Meanwhile, a mine sank Britain’s super-Dreadnought Audacious north of Scotland. Turkey entered the war and became Britain’s enemy. Far afield, the Boers of the Orange Free State, whose sympathies were pro-German, were now staging an uprising against British rule.

In lieu of enlisting in Kitchener’s army, at the start of term Tolkien had immediately enrolled in the university OTC. There were two courses: one for those hoping for a commission imminently, the other for those who wished to delay enlistment. Tolkien was one of twenty-five Exeter College men on the latter, which meant about six and a half hours’ drill and one military lecture per week. ‘We had a drill all afternoon and got soaked several times and our rifles got all filthy and took ages to clean afterwards,’ Tolkien wrote to Edith at the end of his first week. For those of a more sensitive nature, any military training could be sufficiently unpleasant: Rob Gilson, who loathed militarism, had taken Paradise Lost to read at the OTC summer camp at Aldershot the year before, and found that a like-minded friend (Frederick Scopes) had brought Dante’s Inferno. For Tolkien, though, years of playing rugby meant that the physical discomforts, at least, held no horror. The university corps were remote from real soldiering, with no field days or route marches, and rifles were soon taken away for the real war, but the active physical life banished the notorious ‘Oxford “sleepies”’ and brought fresh energy. ‘Drill is a godsend,’ he told Edith.

Reinvigorated, he worked on his Story of Kullervo, a dark tale for dark times, and enthused about the Finnish Kalevala to T. W. Earp, a member of the Exeter College literati. This epic poem was the work of Elias Lönnrot, collated from folk songs passed down orally by generations of ‘rune singers’ in the Karelian region of Finland. Fragmentary and lyrical though these songs were, many referred tantalizingly to an apparently pre-Christian cast of heroic or divine figures headed by the sage Väinamöinen, the smith Ilmarinen, and the boastful rogue Lemminkäinen. Lönnrot had seen his chance to create a Finnish equivalent of what contemporary Iceland and Greece had inherited, a mythological literature; and he did so at a time when the Finns were struggling to find a voice. Finland, ruled by Sweden since the twelfth century but entirely distinct in language, culture, and ethnic history, had become a personal grand duchy of the Tsar of Russia in 1809. Just then the notion that ancient literature expressed the ancestral voice of a people was sweeping through Europe’s academies and salons. When the Kalevala arrived in 1835, it had been embraced by Finnish nationalists, whose goal of independence was still unachieved in 1914.

Tolkien spoke in defence of nationalism at a college debate that November, even as the pride of nations was plunging Europe into catastrophe. Nationalism has carried even sourer connotations since the 1930s, but Tolkien’s version had nothing to do with vaunting one nation above others. To him the nation’s greatest goal was cultural self-realisation, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. ‘I don’t defend “Deutschland über alles” but certainly do in Norwegian “Alt for Norge” [All for Norway],’ he told Wiseman on the eve of the debate. By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish. He could appreciate the Romantic notion of language as an ancestral voice, but he went further: he felt he had actually inherited from his maternal ancestors a taste and an aptitude for the Middle English of the West Midlands, a dialect he was studying for his English course in the religious text Ancrene Riwle. Writing about his life and influences much later, he declared:

I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere.

Like Lönnrot, Tolkien felt that his true culture had been crushed and forgotten; but, characteristically, he saw things on a vast timescale, with the Norman Conquest as the turning point. William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 had brought the curtain down on the use of English in courtly language and in literature for centuries, and ultimately left English laced with non-Germanic words. The voice of a people, effectively, had been silenced for generations, and the continuity of the record had been severed. Tolkien had launched an ingenious counterattack at school, deploring the Norman Conquest ‘in a speech attempting to return to something of Saxon purity of diction’, as the school Chronicle reported – or as Tolkien himself put it, ‘right English goodliness of speechcraft’: a language purged of Latin and French derivatives (though before the end of his speech he forgot, in his excitement, not to use ‘such outlandish horrors as “famous” and “barbarous”’). Old English, though only written down by Christian Anglo-Saxons, had preserved glimpses of the older traditions that fascinated Tolkien in its literature and in the very fabric of its language; and undoubtedly much more had been swept away by the Norman Conquest.

In contrast, the Kalevala had preserved the Finns’ old traditions. Addressing Corpus Christi College’s Sundial Society, at G. B. Smith’s invitation, on 22 November 1914, he declared: ‘These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ He told the Sundial Society: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ This, in effect, was the young J. R. R. Tolkien’s creative manifesto.

Tolkien had read ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ aloud on 27 November 1914 to Exeter College’s Essay Club, at a poorly attended meeting which he called ‘an informal kind of last gasp’ as war emptied Oxford of its undergraduates. G. B. Smith also read the poem and asked his friend what it was really about. Tolkien’s reply speaks volumes about his creative method, even at this early stage. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to find out.’ He had already emulated Lönnrot by working back through the Old English Crist into the ‘undergrowth’ of Germanic tradition, where a mariner called Éarendel might have sailed the skies. The celestial heroes of myth always have earthbound origins, but Tolkien had so far ‘discovered’ nothing about Éarendel’s. Around now he scribbled down some ideas:

Earendel’s boat goes through North. Iceland. Greenland, and the wild islands: a mighty wind and crest of great wave carry him to hotter climes, to back of West Wind. Land of strange men, land of magic. The home of Night. The Spider. He escapes from the meshes of Night with a few comrades, sees a great mountain island and a golden city – wind blows him southward. Tree-men, Sun-dwellers, spices, fire-mountains, red sea: Mediterranean (loses his boat (travels afoot through wilds of Europe?)) or Atlantic…’

The notes then bring the seafarer to the point in ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ where he sails over the rim of the world in pursuit of the Sun. The scale of Tolkien’s imaginative ambitions is at once astonishingly clear. This is an Odyssey in embryo, but one in which the classical milieu of the Mediterranean appears only as an afterthought and whose heart lies in the bitter northern seas around Tolkien’s island home. But startling, too, is the way this elliptical note already foreshadows fundamental moments from The Silmarillion, from the Atlantis-story of Númenor, and even from The Lord of the Rings. Here, perhaps for the first time, these blurred images found their way onto paper. Many of them may have existed in some form already for a long time. But Cynewulf, the Kalevala, G. B. Smith’s probing questions, and arguably even Tolkien’s anxieties over enlistment, all conspired to bring them pouring out now.

THREE The Council of London

It had been agreed that the Oxford contingent of the TCBS would go up to Cambridge for a weekend in the middle of term, on Saturday 31 October 1914, but in the event only G. B. Smith turned up. ‘Tolkien was to come too, but hasn’t, as was to be expected,’ wrote Rob Gilson disappointedly. ‘No one knows why he couldn’t come, least of all Smith, who was with him on Friday night.’ The pair lunched with Christopher Wiseman, attended a Sunday service at King’s College chapel, and strolled around Cambridge. Smith was voluble about what he liked in the rival university town, and deployed his dazzling wit against what he disliked. Gilson wrote: ‘I always value his judgment though I often disagree with it, and am pleased to find that he is immensely enthusiastic about my rooms, and has never seen ones that he preferred – even in Oxford. I had a breakfast party this morning and they looked their best. A sunny morning with shadows across the Bowling Green and just enough mist to make the background of trees a perfect thing – blue and orange…I am having quite a perfect week-end.’ Smith clearly enjoyed it too, for he came back for more the following weekend. There was talk of a further get-together in Oxford.

In fact Tolkien had simply stopped attending TCBS reunions. What seemed perfect to the impressionable Gilson was, to Tolkien, now tainted by a mood antithetical to the original spirit of the club. Humour had always been essential to the group, but originally each member had brought his own brand. Tolkien’s was occasionally boisterous, but he shared with Gilson a gentle delight in the lesser human follies, and he often indulged in wordplay. G. B. Smith had ‘a gift for rapping out preposterous paradoxes’ and for stylistic parody: ‘I played Rugger yesterday, and am one of the three stiffest mortals in Europe in consequence, ’ is GBS parodying the superlative triads of the Welsh Mabinogion. Wiseman enjoyed impromptu farce and abstruse mathematical wit. Sidney Barrowclough, on the other hand, affected a cold cynicism, robing his sarcasm in verbal elegance, and T. K. Barnsley and W. H. Payton favoured Barrowclough’s brand of repartee. Tolkien no longer cared to spend his time with a TCBS under their shadow.

He was not alone. After enduring an evening of inane banter, with which he could not and would not compete, Wiseman had decided to sever his links with the TCBS. He wrote to Tolkien to say that he would not come to the Oxford meeting, declaring, ‘I should only go there, talk a little bilge for the space of a couple of days and go down again. I am getting very bored with the TCBS; none of them seem to have any mortal thing about which they can get angry; they merely make light and clever remarks (GBS is a perfect genius at it, I admit) about nothing at all.’ According to Wiseman, Barnsley and Barrowclough had demolished his own self-confidence, and Gilson’s. Now, before it was too late, he appealed to his oldest friend ‘by all the memories of VT [Vincent Trought], of Gothic, of binges in Highfield Road, of quarrels about philology’ to come to a crisis meeting after term with Gilson, Smith, and himself.

Such was his disenchantment that he scarcely expected a reply. Instead, he found that for once he and Tolkien were in total agreement. ‘I tell you, when I had finished your letter I felt I could hug you,’ Wiseman wrote back. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge had ‘destroyed what made you and me the Twin Brethren in the good old school days before there was a TCBS apart from us and VT’, he said.

Tolkien defended G. B. Smith, saying his superficiality was just a mask adopted in response to the ‘alien spirit’ now dominating their conclaves; but he agreed that Gilson had gradually lost interest in matters of moral weight and was now simply an aesthete. Tolkien thought Smith fell broadly into the same category, but he suspected that both men were still simply a trifle callow, rather than intrinsically shallow. Certainly he had no thought of excluding them. About one thing Tolkien was adamant: ‘the TCBS is four and four only’; the ‘hangers-on’ must be ejected.

Despite his strictures, Tolkien maintained that the society was ‘a great idea which has never become quite articulate’. Its two poles, the moral and the aesthetic, could be complementary if kept in balance, yet its members did not actually know each other well enough. While the Great Twin Brethren had discussed the fundamentals of existence, neither of them had done so with Gilson or Smith. As a result, Tolkien declared, the potential these four ‘amazing’ individuals contained in combination remained unbroached. So it was that the moral wing of the TCBS determined that the four should meet in Wandsworth two weeks before Christmas. ‘TCBS über alles,’ Wiseman signed off, wryly, at the end of a frantic few days’ correspondence.

It was touch-and-go whether G. B. Smith and Rob Gilson would be able to get to the ‘Council of London’, as the crisis summit was dubbed. Wiseman, like Tolkien, had early on decided to complete his degree before enlisting, on the basis that Kaiser Wilhelm had declared his soldiers would be back home by the time the leaves had fallen from the trees. Smith and Gilson, however, both now joined Kitchener’s army.

Gilson had found Cambridge as sad and dark in wartime as Tolkien found Oxford, and since the start of term had been pondering cutting short his final year. His father, the Headmaster of King Edward’s, had advised him to get his degree before enlisting, and told him (with some sophistry but more foresight) that he had no right to desert Cambridge now, when the university corps needed every man it could get in order to ensure a future supply of officers as the war went on. The turning point seems to have come for Gilson in early November, when a shy and difficult undergraduate whom he had just befriended, F. L. Lucas, reluctantly joined up. ‘He is not at all the sort of person who rushes into it without thinking what it means,’ wrote Gilson. ‘He is really rather a hero…’* Military lectures had impressed upon the sensitive Gilson ‘what a fearful responsibility it is to be entrusted with so many men’s lives’. On the other hand, he felt guilty for not volunteering, and was surprised to find himself enjoying even the most gruelling field exercises. Others of the broader TCBS had now joined up. Sidney Barrowclough had been accepted in the Royal Field Artillery, and Ralph Payton had become a private in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, T. K. Barnsley’s unit; though W. H. Payton had found an honourable alternative to combat by signing up for the Indian Civil Service in August. Desperate to put an end to months of doubt and guilt, Gilson waited until his twenty-first birthday was past, and on 28 November he joined the Cambridgeshire Battalion as a second lieutenant.

It was a relief, for although Gilson was strictly too sensitive for military life, he was sociable and found it easy to get on with his fellow officers. G. B. Smith, however, who was also sensitive but considerably less tolerant and naturally undisciplined, felt ‘much more a fish out of water’ after he followed suit on 1 December. Cary Gilson provided a character reference, and Oxford’s home regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, took the young poet on. It meant Smith would be training in Oxford and billeted at Magdalen College, where he would be on hand to see Tolkien’s burgeoning efforts at writing. One of Smith’s own poems, ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (‘hail and farewell’), had just appeared in the Oxford Magazine: a paean to his university town (but also to life itself) announcing ‘we may not linger here. A little while, and we are gone…’

In the event, the two new subalterns both managed to arrange leave so that they could come to London on Saturday, 12 December. Gilson had moved the day before into officers’ huts at his battalion’s newly built camp at Cherry Hinton, just outside Cambridge. Under the auspices of Wiseman, in normal circumstances the visit would have been hilarious and carefree, with impromptu outings, missed trains, and countless telephone calls as he tried to keep his mother informed of his schedule. What with the family talent for chaos, and his father’s unpredictable hours, formality had given up the ghost at 33 Routh Road, Wandsworth. But now the four friends had urgent matters to discuss. They closeted themselves in Wiseman’s upstairs room and talked late into the night.

They dubbed the reunion ‘the Council of London’ as if it were a council of war; in fact it was a council of life. War did not intrude, despite the enlistment of Smith and Gilson: in Rob’s words, the four of them were ‘absolutely undistracted by the outside world’. They had made a timely decision, though, to combine and consider the matter in hand: the greatness of the TCBS. That the TCBS was somehow great was a long-standing conviction based on mutual admiration. Gilson now doubted the truth of it, but Wiseman thought that together they each seemed ‘four times the intellectual size’, as if each one absorbed the capabilities of all. Tolkien felt the same way about ‘the inspiration that even a few hours with the four always brought to all of us’; but the inanity that had overtaken the wider group in recent years had left Tolkien and Wiseman convinced that it must now plant its feet firmly in the bedrock of fundamental principles: in other words, all four must open up about their deepest convictions, as the Great Twin Brethren had done long ago. Tolkien put religion, human love, patriotic duty, and nationalism on the agenda. It was not necessary that they all agree, but it was important that they discover the ‘allowable distance apart’, as he put it: in other words, how much internal dissent the club could accommodate.

The Council surpassed all their hopes. ‘I never spent happier hours,’ Rob wrote to John Ronald afterwards. For Tolkien, the weekend was a revelation, and he came to regard it as a turning point in his creative life. It was, he said eighteen months later, the moment when he first became conscious of ‘the hope and ambitions (inchoate and cloudy I know)’ that had driven him ever since, and were to drive him for the rest of his life.

Tolkien had long harboured creative ambitions, but they had found their outlet in his invented languages, at one extreme, or in drawings. Now all that changed. It may well be that, under the oppressive weight of war, he felt an answering pressure from within that could find no outlet in the old creative habits. He had experimented with prose in his Story of Kullervo. Now, however, he was going to take his cue from the Kalevala itself, from the verse into which Kullervo had fallen with increasing frequency, and from G. B. Smith. He would become a poet.

In fact he had started already, a week before the Council, by writing an ambitious poem in a percussive version of the long line he had used in ‘From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames’. In its earliest published form, ‘The Tides’ begins:

I sat on the ruined margin of the deep voiced echoing sea

Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency

On the land besieged for ever in an aeon of assaults

And torn in towers and pinnacles and caverned in great vaults:

And its arches shook with thunder and its feet were piled with shapes

Riven in old sea-warfare from those crags and sable capes

By ancient battailous tempest and primeval mighty tide…

Subtitled ‘On the Cornish Coast’, this was the poetic expression of the sea-awe that Tolkien had described in his letters and drawings in Cornwall that summer of 1914. While the martial imagery might have been coloured by the fact that this was written at a moment of war, and amid widespread fear of invasion, he was concerned with processes on a geological timescale. The poet’s presence is almost incidental: he is there merely to witness the action of primal oceanic forces, inhuman and sublime. The piece gives a very early glimpse of Tolkien’s intense awareness of the vast histories inscribed within a landscape – an awareness that gives his mythological world the texture of reality.

Very soon he was adding more poems to his corpus, in a rush of creativity that for him was unprecedented. ‘That Council,’ Tolkien told G. B. Smith, ‘was…followed in my own case with my finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything.’ A painting made two days after Christmas captures this strange mood of uplift in the midst of dark times: The Land of Pohja, depicting a scene from the Kalevala in which the Sun and Moon, drawn by the beauty of the wizard Väinämöinen’s harp-playing, settle in the branches of two trees, filling the icebound wastes with light.

Tolkien was also absorbed once more in the Finnish language itself, and it played the most productive role in a creative breakthrough. When he had borrowed a college library copy of Chaucer to continue studying for his English course during the Christmas vacation, he had also taken Eliot’s Finnish Grammar out again. He immersed himself in the book, but not in order to read more Finnish; rather, he was allowing Finnish to shape the language he now hoped to devise. The language of the Kalevala had long been supplanting the earlier primacy of Gothic in his philological heart. At some point as 1915 came in, Tolkien took an exercise book, in which he had apparently been outlining aspects of Gautisk, and struck out his old notes, ready to make a fresh beginning. He tried out several names for the new language, eventually settling on Qenya.

To Tolkien, working in the familiar fields of English and its Indo-European relatives, Finnish was remote, mysterious, and peculiarly beautiful. Its culture was pre-industrial, with ancient roots. By tapping into it, Tolkien was following, in his idiosyncratic way, the contemporary vogue for primitivism that had attracted Picasso to African masks. In the Kalevala, the natural and the supernatural were intimate and intermingled: the language, as Tolkien said, revealed ‘an entirely different mythological world’.

The small, stark array of consonants and the chiming inflexional word-endings of Finnish produce a distinctive musicality that Tolkien adapted for Qenya; but he wanted a language with its own past, so he detailed how Qenya had evolved from an ancestral tongue that he soon named Primitive Eldarin. As in any real-world language, the process was a combination of sound shifts (phonology), the deployment of word-building elements (morphology) like the -s or -es that commonly pluralize an English noun, and developments in meaning (semantics).* A further fascination of this linguistic alchemy was that, as in the real world, an alternative set of sound-changes and morphological elements would produce elsewhere a quite different language from the same ancestral stock – an option Tolkien also began to explore before long.

Tolkien’s sound-shift ‘laws’ fill many dry pages of his early Qenya notebook, but they were as essential to Qenya as the changes codified in Grimm’s Law are to German or English. He often wrote as if, like Jakob Grimm, he too were merely an observer looking back at the unrecorded but nonetheless real past of a living language. Even in these phonological notes, Tolkien was already entering into his world as a fiction writer does. From this ‘internal’ viewpoint, the sound shifts were unalterable facts of observed history.

In practice, though, Tolkien also played God (or sub-creator emulating the Creator, as he would later have put it). He did not just observe history; he made it. Instead of working back from recorded evidence to reconstruct the lost ancestral ‘roots’ of words, as Grimm had done to arrive at a picture of ancient Germanic, he could invent Primitive Eldarin roots and move forward, adding affixes and applying sound shifts to arrive at Qenya. Furthermore, Tolkien could change a sound-shift law, and he sometimes did. Because each law should apply across the language, this might entail alterations to any number of words and their individual histories. Revision on that scale was a painstaking process, but it gave Tolkien a perfectionist’s pleasure. There was scope here for a lifetime’s tinkering, and he used it.

If these austere sound-shift laws were the ‘scientific’ formulae by which Tolkien generated his ‘romantic’ language – as essential to its personal character as DNA is to our own – inventing Qenya was also an exercise in taste as heartfelt as any art. Tolkien’s sound-pictures were always acute: the bassy kalongalan, ‘ringing or jangling of (large) bells’, and its alto counterpart kilinkelë, ‘jingling of (small) bells’; the elegant alternations of vassivaswë for ‘beating or rushing of wings’; or the tongue-twisting pataktatapakta, ‘rat-a-tat’. Qenya is more than onomatopoeic, though: nang-, ‘I have a cold’, and miqë, ‘a kiss’ (pronounced more or less as ‘mee-kweh’), mimic what the speech organs do when your nose is blocked or your mouth is amorously engaged. Of course, most concepts have no intrinsic connection with any particular sound or mouth-movement. Tolkien tried to match sound and sense much as an expressionist painter might use colour, form, and shade to evoke a mood. Derivation aside, only taste dictated that fūmelotmeans ‘poppy’, eressëa means ‘lonely’, or morwen, ‘daughter of the dark’, signifies the glimmering planet Jupiter.

Crucially, Tolkien used Qenya to create a world like our own, yet unlike. Its trees are ours but their names make them sound as if they are on the verge of communication: the laburnum is lindeloktë, ‘singing cluster’, while siqilissë, ‘weeping willow’, also means ‘lamentation’ itself. This is a world of austa and yelin, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’; of lisēlë, piqēlë, and piqissë, ‘sweetness’, ‘bitterness’, and ‘grief’. But enchantment courses through Qenya: from kuru ‘magic, wizardry’ to Kampo the Leaper, a name for Eärendel, and to a whole host of other names for peoples and places that emerged during a couple of years’ work on the lexicon. For Tolkien, to a greater extent even than Charles Dickens, a name was the first principle of story-making. His Qenya lexicon was a writer’s notebook.

At the start of March, Rob Gilson wrote inviting Tolkien to join Wiseman and himself in Cambridge. Smith was going too, and Gilson was eager to repeat the experience of the ‘Council of London’. Ever since that weekend he had been enduring the unaccustomed hardships of military training, living in a hut in an often flooded field, sometimes ill from inoculations, and suffering a growing sense of pessimism. ‘I have quite lost now any conviction that the war is likely to end within the next six months,’ Gilson wrote home. ‘If anyone with a gift of prophecy were to tell me that the war would last ten years, I shouldn’t feel the least surprise.’ He told Tolkien, ‘My whole endurance of the present is founded on the remembrance that I am a TCBSite…But another conclave would be the most perfect bliss imaginable.’ If Tolkien could not come to Cambridge the following weekend, Gilson would be ‘bitterly disappointed’.

Nevertheless, he did not turn up. On the Saturday the three wired an ultimatum calling on him to appear, or resign from the TCBS. It was not, of course, entirely serious. ‘When we sent the telegram,’ Wiseman wrote to Tolkien the following week, ‘we were groping for the thousand and first time in the dark for a John Ronald of whom there appeared no sound or sight or rumour in any direction…It always seems to us odd that you should so consistently be the only one left out of the TCBS.’

‘Schools’ were fast approaching, and Tolkien had to prepare for ten papers. Most of them covered areas in which he was an enthusiast: Gothic and Germanic philology, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle English language and literature. Volsunga Saga, The Seafarer, Havelock the Dane, Troilus and Criseyde: these he should have no trouble with. He had been familiar with some of this material for several years prior to joining the English course at Oxford, and ever since switching from Classics he had been breezily confident about doing well. But a week after the missed Cambridge meeting (as a three-day British offensive failed at Neuve-Chapelle) he headed off for the Easter vacation armed with set texts, and at Edith’s in Warwick he worked through the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale line by line, making thorough notes on vocabulary (such as attercoppe, ‘poisonheads’, which he later gave to Bilbo Baggins as a taunt against the spiders of Mirkwood).

His other work, poetry, occupied him too. At the end of term Tolkien had again found an audience for his poetry at Exeter College’s Essay Club (the club had in fact survived well beyond its November ‘last gasp’), which listened to him read ‘The Tides’, or as he had named his revision of the poem, ‘Sea Chant of an Elder Day’. G. B. Smith had seen at least ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ in manuscript, but now Tolkien wanted to submit a whole set of poems to the TCBS for criticism. He had typescripts made of various Eärendel ‘fragments’ and other poems and sent them to Smith at his Magdalen College billets.

Smith was perplexed. As a conservative and a lover of classical form, he found Tolkien’s wayward romanticism problematic. He also favoured the new simplicity of Georgian Poetry, an influential 1913 anthology edited by Edward Marsh, which included poems by Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Davies, and Walter de la Mare. Accordingly Smith urged Tolkien to simplify the syntax of ‘Sea Chant’ and others. He advised him to read and learn from ‘good authors’; although his idea of a ‘good’ author was not exactly congruent with Tolkien’s. However, he thought the poems ‘amazingly good’ and showed them to Henry Theodore Wade-Gery, a former Oxford Classics don who was a captain in Smith’s battalion and himself an accomplished poet.* Wade-Gery agreed that the syntax was occasionally too difficult, but like Smith he strongly approved of this love-poem:

Lo! young we are and yet have stood like planted hearts in the great Sun of Love so long (as two fair trees in woodland or in open dale stand utterly entwined, and breathe the airs, and suck the very light together) that we have become as one, deep-rooted in the soil of Life, and tangled in sweet growth.

The parenthetical aside introduces an eloquent delay, as if to suggest the duration of the lovers’ growth together before the final clause reveals the result of that long entanglement.

Light as a tangible substance (often a liquid) was to become a recurrent feature of Tolkien’s mythology. It is tempting to locate its origin here. It is noteworthy, too, that the Two Trees of Valinor, which were to illumine his created world, had their progenitors here in a poem celebrating his relationship with Edith and in his symbolic drawing Undertenishness.

Both Smith and Wade-Gery also favoured a poem written in March called ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’, in which Tolkien took a well-known nursery rhyme and retold it at length. The original version is nonsensical:

The man in the moon

came down too soon,

And asked the way to Norwich;

He went by the south

And burned his mouth

With supping cold plum porridge.

Tolkien’s retelling makes sense of the story (thankfully, without sacrificing any of its absurdity). The Man in the Moon acquires both personality and motive, leaving his chill and colourless lunar kingdom because he craves the exuberance of the Earth. In counterpoint to the ‘viands hot, and wine’ the Man in the Moon desires, his accustomed diet of ‘pearly cakes of light snowflakes’ and ‘thin moonshine’ sounds royally unsatisfying. Grandiose latinisms embellish the Man in the Moon’s vain imaginings until he is brought down to earth with a bump – or rather a splash. With the help of some deliciously pithy images (‘his round heart nearly broke’), the blunter Germanic words help to win him some sympathy.

He twinkled his feet as he thought of the meat,

Of the punch and the peppery stew,

Till he tripped unaware on his slanting stair,

And fell like meteors do;

As the whickering sparks in splashing arcs

Of stars blown down like rain

From his laddery path took a foaming bath

In the Ocean of Almain.

Tolkien is seen at play in the English language. To twinkle is to move with a flutter (the Oxford English Dictionary cites a dance, the twinkle-step, in 1920), but appropriately it is also to glimmer like stars; whickering is the sound of something hurtling through air, but aptly enough it is also sniggering laughter. Of course, the Man in the Moon’s adventure ends ignominiously. He is fished out by trawlermen who take him to Norwich, where, instead of a royal welcome, in exchange for his jewels and ‘faerie cloak’ he gets merely a bowl of gruel.

The poem is a fine example of Tolkien’s lightness of touch and as a piece of comic verse marks a great step from the merely parodic ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’. At first it was not connected with the mythological world then being sketched out in the Qenya lexicon; but (as Tom Shippey has pointed out) the extraction of a whole story from six lines of nursery nonsense shows the same fascination with reconstructing the true tales behind garbled survivals that powered Tolkien’s myth-making.

Smith welcomed the arrival of another poet in the TCBS and had sent the poems on to Gilson by the end of March. To both John Ronald and Rob he also despatched copies of his own work, a long Arthurian piece called ‘Glastonbury’ he had written for Oxford University’s annual Newdigate Prize and described as ‘the most TCBSian mosaic of styles and seasons’.*

There was another abortive attempt to arrange a TCBS meeting, this time in Oxford, where Tolkien would play host at St John Street. It seemed, perhaps, the only way to guarantee his involvement, but just ahead of the appointed date G. B. Smith wrote to say that the ‘Council of Oxford’ was off: he was at home on sick leave and caught up in a whirlwind attempt to leave the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry so that he and Tolkien could be soldiers together.

The battalion had taken him on as a ‘supernumerary’ in December 1914 because its officer quota was full. It would certainly have no vacancy for Tolkien when he finished Schools. Accordingly, Smith had decided to transfer with Wade-Gery, his favourite among the officers, into another battalion. ‘I suppose I have your approval?’ he wrote to Tolkien on Easter Monday. An acquaintance at the War Office arranged the transfer to the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers, which was training at Penmaenmawr on Conwy Bay in North Wales. When all was fixed, Smith had to face another week with his existing battalion during which, he said, he would ‘think often of the TCBS, possibly to the strains of a Court-Martial’.

He warned, though, that there could be no guarantees of a commission in his new battalion for Tolkien, but advised him, ‘You can be sure of getting somewhere in the Army I think, unless things have collapsed by June.’ If the war was still under way, Smith said, he could recommend battalions in which his life would not be at great risk and Tolkien could save up to £50 a year for his fiancée. ‘I can’t help thinking that your prospects afterwards would be improved,’ he added, ‘unless you could snap up a good thing [a civilian job] at once in June, in which case I should advise you to take it, and let the old country go hang. You can always join a volunteer defence corps, to make your mind easy.’

Smith and Wade-Gery were among a set of ‘other literary Oxford lights’ who, as Rob Gilson put it, ‘had gone in a body to officer the Lancashire Fusiliers’. The move perhaps reflected the mood of ‘mucking in together’ by people from all walks of life, very different from the rancour and industrial class-strife that had preceded the war. For the battalion Smith was joining was known informally as the 3rd Salford Pals and had just been formed in an industrial suburb of Manchester.* Its rank and file were drawn from towns of the East Lancashire coalfield. The Oxford University men duly took their place as officers beside the bankers and businessmen of Eccles, Swinton, and Salford. The ‘Pals’ battalions, such as those in Birmingham which Hilary Tolkien, T. K. Barnsley, and Ralph Payton had joined, emerged from the parochial pride and close-knit friendships within English towns and villages, especially in the North: recruits would be largely drummed up en masse from a single place, and groups of friends would be encouraged to join together. It could be a haphazard process: the 3rd Salford Pals consisted of men who had been meant for another Salford unit but had missed the train.

The Lancashire Fusiliers had a fine reputation dating back to the landing of William of Orange in England in 1688, and in the Seven Years War its infantry had shattered the charge of the supposedly invincible French cavalry at Minden. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington described it as ‘the best and most distinguished’ of British regiments. Most recently, during the Boer War, the Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered the heaviest casualties in the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, but had gone on to the relief of Ladysmith.

When G. B. Smith joined the 19th Battalion, the regiment had just etched its name bloodily and tragically in the history books again. As the Oxford term began, on Sunday 25 April 1915, the British-Anzac assault was launched at Gallipoli against the Turkish allies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The day was a foretaste of thirty-seven weeks to come: a disastrously unequal fight, with British and Anzac troops wading ashore under cruel cliffs surmounted by wire and machine-gun posts. Nevertheless, the worn word ‘hero’ was being reforged in galvanizing fires. In the forefront of the assault, the Lancashire Fusiliers rowed into a hail of bullets at ‘W Beach’ on Cape Helles. As they leapt from their boats, seventy pounds of equipment dragged many of the injured to death by drowning. On reaching the shore, others foundered on the barbed wire, which a preceding naval bombardment had failed to break. The beach was secured that day but 260 of the 950 attacking Fusiliers were killed and 283 wounded. In the eyes of many at home, however, the regiment covered itself in glory, and eventually it reaped a historic six Victoria Crosses for that morning on the beach.

Tolkien soon decided he would indeed try to follow Smith into the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers. His reasons are not recorded, but if he succeeded he would be going to war with his closest friend. He would also be surrounded by Oxford men who shared a literary outlook, and (a factor that should not be underestimated) training would take place in Wales, a land whose native tongue was rapidly joining Finnish as an inspiration for his language invention and legend-making.

On the day of the Gallipoli landings, Wiseman wrote to Tolkien to say that he had now read his poems, which Gilson had sent on to him a couple of weeks before. G. B. Smith had commended the verses, but until he saw them for himself Wiseman was far from convinced that his old friend from the Great Twin Brethren had now become a poet. ‘I can’t think where you get all your amazing words from,’ he wrote. ‘The Man in the Moon’ he called ‘magnificently gaudy’ and thought that ‘Two Trees’ was quite the best poem he had read in ages. Wiseman had even gone so far as to start composing an accompaniment to ‘Woodsunshine’ for two violins, cello, and bassoon. Plucking a simile from the world at war, he described the ending of another poem, ‘Copernicus and Ptolemy’, as being ‘rather like a systematic and well thought out bombardment with asphyxiating bombs’. Tolkien’s poems had astonished him, he said. ‘They burst on me like a bolt from the blue.’

FOUR The shores of Faërie

April 1915, bringing the Great War’s first spring, could have been ‘the cruellest month’ T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land: halcyon weather, everywhere the stirrings of life, and enervating horror as news and rumour told of thousands of young men dying on all fronts. Closer to home, Zeppelins struck the Essex coast just where the Anglo-Saxon earl Beorhtnoth and his household troop had been defeated by Viking raiders almost ten centuries before. Tolkien, who was now studying that earlier clash between the continental Teutons and their island cousins in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, was already familiar with the lines uttered by one of Beorhtnoth’s retainers as fortune turned against the English:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.

As Tolkien later translated it: ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’ Ancient it might be, but this summation of the old Northern heroic code answered eloquently to the needs of Tolkien’s day. It contains the awareness that death may come, but it focuses doggedly on achieving the most with what strength remains: it had more to commend it, in terms of personal and strategic morale, than the self-sacrificial and quasi-mystical tone of Rupert Brooke’s already-famous The Soldier, which implied that a soldier’s worth to his nation was greater in death than life:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

G.B. Smith admired Brooke’s poetry and thought Tolkien should read it, but the poems Tolkien wrote when he settled back in at 59 St John Street at the end of the month could hardly have been more different. On Tuesday 27 April he set to work on two ‘fairy’ pieces, finishing them the next day. One of these, ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, is a 65-line love poem to Edith. Hauntingly, it suggests that when they first met they had already known each other in dreams:

You and me – we know that land

And often have been there

In the long old days, old nursery days,

A dark child and a fair.

Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

In winter cold and white,

Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

Of little early tucked-up beds

In drowsy summer night,

That You and I got lost in Sleep

And met each other there –

Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

And mine was tangled fair?

The poem recalls the two dreamers arriving at a strange and mystical cottage whose windows look towards the sea. Of course, this is quite unlike the urban setting in which he and Edith had actually come to know each other. It was an expression of tastes that had responded so strongly to Sarehole, Rednal, and holidays on the coast, or that had been shaped by those places. But already Tolkien was being pulled in opposite directions, towards nostalgic, rustic beauty and also towards unknown, untamed sublimity. Curiously, the activities of the other dreaming children at the Cottage of Lost Play hint at Tolkien’s world-building urges, for while some dance and sing and play, others lay ‘plans / To build them houses, fairy towns, / Or dwellings in the trees’.

A debt is surely owed to Peter Pan’s Neverland. Tolkien had seen J. M. Barrie’s masterpiece at the theatre as an eighteen-year-old in 1910, writing afterwards: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live.’ This was a play aimed squarely at an orphan’s heart, featuring a cast of children severed from their mothers by distance or death. A chiaroscuro by turns sentimental and cynical, playful and deadly serious, Peter Pan took a rapier to mortality itself – its hero a boy who refuses to grow up and who declares that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

But Tolkien’s idyll, for all its carefree joy, is lost in the past. Time has reasserted itself, to the grief and bewilderment of the dreamers.

And why it was Tomorrow came,

And with his grey hand led us back;

And why we never found the same

Old cottage, or the magic track

That leads between a silver sea

And those old shores and gardens fair

Where all things are, that ever were –

We know not, You and Me.

The companion piece Tolkien wrote at the same time, ‘Goblin Feet’, finds us on a similar magic track surrounded by a twilight hum of bats and beetles and sighing leaves. A procession of fairy-folk approaches and the poem slips into an ecstatic sequence of exclamations.

O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:

O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:

O! the echo of their feet – of their little happy feet:

O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

Yet ‘Goblin Feet’ turns in an instant from rising joy to loss and sadness, capturing once again a very Tolkienian yearning. The mortal onlooker wants to pursue the happy band, or rather he feels compelled to do so; but no sooner is the thought formed than the troop disappears around a bend.

I must follow in their train

Down the crooked fairy lane

Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,

And where silverly they sing

In a moving moonlit ring

All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.

They are fading round the turn

Where the glow-worms palely burn

And the echo of their padding feet is dying!

O! it’s knocking at my heart –

Let me go! O! let me start!

For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!

O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!

O! the music of their feet – of their dancing goblin feet!

O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Enchantment, as we know from fairy-tale tradition, tends to slip away from envious eyes and possessive fingers – though there is no moral judgement implied in ‘Goblin Feet’. Faërie and the mortal yearning it evokes seem two sides of a single coin, a fact of life.

In a third, slighter, piece that followed on 29 and 30 April, Tolkien pushed the idea of faëry exclusiveness further. ‘Tinfang Warble’ is a short carol, barely more than a sound-experiment, perhaps written to be set to music, with its echo (‘O the hoot! O the hoot!’) of the exclamatory chorus of ‘Goblin Feet’. In part, the figure of Tinfang Warble is descended in literary tradition from Pan, the piper-god of nature; in part, he comes from a long line of shepherds in pastoral verse, except he has no flock. Now the faëry performance lacks even the communal impulse of the earlier poem’s marching band. It is either put on for the benefit of a single glimmering star, or it is entirely solipsistic.

Dancing all alone,

Hopping on a stone,

Flitting like a faun,

In the twilight on the lawn,

And his name is Tinfang Warble!

The first star has shown

And its lamp is blown

To a flame of flickering blue.

He pipes not to me,

He pipes not to thee,

He whistles for none of you.

Tinfang Warble is a wisp of a figure, barely glimpsed. Meanwhile everything about the rather sugar-spun and Victorianesque marching figures of ‘Goblin Feet’ is miniature; the word ‘little’ becomes a tinkling refrain. Tolkien was clearly tailoring these poems for Edith, whom he would habitually address as ‘little one’ and whose home he called a ‘little house’. Late in life he declared of ‘Goblin Feet’ – with perhaps a hint of self-parody – ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’ Nevertheless, although these 1915 ‘leprechauns’ have almost nothing in common with the Eldar of Tolkien’s mature work, they represent (with the distant exception of 1910’s ‘Wood-sunshine’) the first irruption of Faërie into Tolkien’s writings. In fact the idea that ‘fairies’ or Elves were physically slight persisted for some years in his mythology, which never shed the idea that they fade into evanescence as the dominion of mortals grows stronger.

Tolkien’s April 1915 poems were not especially innovatory in their use of fantasy landscapes and figures; indeed they drew on the imagery and ideas of the fairy tradition in English literature. Since the Reformation, Faërie had undergone major revolutions in the hands of Spenser, Shakespeare, the Puritans, the Victorians, and most recently J. M. Barrie. Its denizens had been noble, mischievous, helpful, devilish; tiny, tall; grossly physical or ethereal and beautiful; sylvan, subterranean, or sea-dwelling; utterly remote or constantly intruding in human affairs; allies of the aristocracy or friends of the labouring poor. This long tradition had left the words elf, gnome, and fay/fairy with diverse and sometimes contradictory associations. Small wonder that Christopher Wiseman was confused by ‘Wood-sunshine’ and (as he confessed to Tolkien) ‘mistook elves for gnomes, with bigger heads than bodies’.

In ‘Goblin Feet’, goblins and gnomes are interchangeable, as they were in the ‘Curdie’ books of George MacDonald, which Tolkien had loved as a child (‘a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins’). Initially, Tolkien’s Qenya lexicon conflated them as well and related them to the elvish word for ‘mole’, evidently because Tolkien was thinking of Paracelsus’ gnomus, an elemental creature that moves through earth as a fish swims in water. Very soon, however, he assigned the terms goblin and gnome to members of distinct races at daggers drawn. He used gnome (Greek gnōmē, ‘thought, intelligence’) for a member of an Elf-kindred who embody a profound scientific and artistic understanding of the natural world from gemcraft to phonology: its Qenya equivalent was noldo, related to the word for ‘to know’. Thanks to the later British fad for ornamental garden gnomes (not so named until 1938), gnome is now liable to raise a smirk, and Tolkien eventually abandoned it.

Yet even in 1915 fairy was a problematic term: too generic, and with increasingly diverse connotations. Tolkien’s old King Edward’s schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, soon warned him that the title he proposed for his volume of verse, The Trumpets of Faërie (after a poem written in the summer), was ‘a little precious’: the word faërie had become ‘rather spoiled of late’. Reynolds was thinking, perhaps, not of recent trends in fairy writing, but of the use of fairy to mean ‘homosexual’, which dated from the mid-1890s.

For now, though, the fate of the word was not yet sealed, and Tolkien stuck pugnaciously to it. He was not alone: Robert Graves entitled his 1917 collection Fairies and Fusiliers, with no pun apparently intended. Great War soldiers were weaned on Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale anthologies and original stories such as George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and Faërie’s stock had surged with the success of Peter Pan, a story of adventure and eternal youth that now had additional relevance for boys on the threshold of manhood facing battle. Tinfang Warble had a contemporary visual counterpart in a painting that found a mass-market in Kitchener’s Army. Eleanor Canziani’s Piper of Dreams, which proved to be the belated swansong of the Victorian fairy-painting tradition, depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies. Reproduced by the Medici Society in 1915, it sold an unprecedented 250,000 copies before the year was out. In the trenches, The Piper of Dreams became, in one appraisal, ‘a sort of talisman’.

A more cynical view is that ‘the war called up the fairies. Like other idle consumers, they were forced into essential war-work.’ A 1917 stage play had ‘Fairy voices calling, Britain needs your aid’. Occasionally, soldiers’ taste for the supernatural might be used to perk up an otherwise dull and arduous training exercise, as Rob Gilson discovered on one bitterly cold battalion field day: ‘There was a fantastic “scheme” involving a Witch-Doctor who was supposed to be performing incantations in Madingley Church. C and D Companies represented a flying column sent from a force to the West to capture the wizard.’ On the whole, however, the fairies were spared from the recruitment drive and wizards were relieved from military manoeuvres. Faërie still entered the lives of soldiers, but it was left to work on the imagination in a more traditional and indefinable way. Though George MacDonald had urged against attempts to pin down the meaning of fairy-tale, declaring ‘I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being’, Tolkien made the attempt twenty-four years later in his paper ‘On Fairy-stories’, in which he maintained that Faërie provided the means of recovery, escape, and consolation. The rubric may be illustrated by applying it to the Great War, when Faërie allowed the soldier to recover a sense of beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses afflicting him – even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.

To brighten up trench dugouts, one philanthropist sent specially illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Land of Nod’, with its half-haunting, half-alluring version of fairyland. To raise money for orphans of the war at sea, a Navy Book of Fairy Tales was published in which Admiral Sir John Jellicoe noted that ‘Unhappily a great many of our sailors and marines (unlike the more fortunate fairies) do get killed in the process of killing the giant.’ Faërie as a version of Olde England could evoke home or childhood and inspire patriotism, while Faërie as the land of the dead or the ever-young could suggest an afterlife less austere and remote than the Judaeo-Christian heaven.

Tolkien’s new poems, read as the imaginings of a young man on the brink of wartime military service, seem poignantly wistful. He was facing the relinquishment of long-cherished hopes. His undergraduate education was coming to its end in a matter of weeks, but the ever-lengthening war had taken away any immediate chance of settling down with Edith. Hopes of an academic career must be put on hold. As rumour filtered back from the front line, it was growing increasingly clear too that (to paraphrase the famous subtitle of The Hobbit) he could not go there and be sure of coming back again.

The rush of creativity was not over, but finally Tolkien adopted a quite different register for ‘Kôr’, a sonnet of sublimity and grandeur. Kôr was the name of a city in Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the tale of Ayesha, a woman blessed and cursed with apparently eternal youth. Haggard had been a favourite in the King Edward’s library; during the mock school strike of 1911 the sub-librarians called for a ban on ‘Henty, Haggard, School Tales, etc…that can be read out in one breath’. (The following year Tolkien had presented the school library with another Haggardesque ‘lost race’ yarn, The Lost Explorers by Alexander Macdonald. ) Tolkien’s 30 April poem was subtitled ‘In a City Lost and Dead’, and indeed Haggard’s Kôr is also deserted, the enduring memorial to a great civilization that flourished six thousand years before modern adventurers stumble upon it, but now is utterly lost to memory:

I know not how I am to describe what we saw, magnificent as it was even in its ruin, almost beyond the power of realisation. Court upon dim court, row upon row of mighty pillars – some of them (especially at the gateways) sculptured from pedestal to capital – space upon space of empty chambers that spoke more eloquently to the imagination than any crowded streets. And over all, the dead silence of the dead, the sense of utter loneliness, and the brooding spirit of the Past! How beautiful it was, and yet how drear! We did not dare to speak aloud.

Both men’s versions of Kôr are inhabited only by shadows and stone; but whereas Haggard’s is seen, with overt symbolism, under the changeful Moon, Tolkien’s city basks under the steadily blazing Sun.

A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned

Stands gazing out across an azure sea

Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground

Impearled as ‘gainst a floor of porphyry

Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;

And tawny shadows fingered long are made

In fretted bars upon their ivory walls

By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade

Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault

With shaft and capital of black basalt.

There slow forgotten days for ever reap

The silent shadows counting out rich hours;

And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers

White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.

The shift is significant. Haggard’s narrator sees the city as a symbol of transience, a memento mori, a mockery of its builders’ hubristic ambition: Tolkien holds the grandeur and the emptiness of his Kôr in a fine balance. Even empty, his city stands as an enduring tribute to its unnamed inhabitants – a mood that anticipates Moria in The Lord of the Rings. Life, though now absent from Kôr, retains its significance. Nihilism is replaced by a consolatory vision.

Tolkien’s Kôr differs from Haggard’s in other, more tangible ways. It is embattled and built atop a vast black hill, and it stands by the sea, recalling a painting he had made earlier in 1915: the mysteriously named Tanaqui. It is clear that Tolkien already had his own vision of a city quite distinct from Haggard’s; but his use of the name ‘Kôr’ now, instead of ‘Tanaqui’, may be seen as a direct challenge to Haggard’s despairing view of mortality, memory, and meaning.

The city of Kôr appears in the Qenya lexicon too, again situated on a shoreland height. Here, though, a more important feature cuts it well and truly adrift from Haggard. Tolkien’s Kôr is located not in Africa but in Faërie: it is ‘the ancient town built above the rocks of Eldamar, whence the fairies marched into the world’. Other early entries give the words inwë for ‘fairy’ and elda for ‘beach-fay or Solosimpë (shore-piper)’. Eldamar, Tolkien wrote, is ‘the rocky beach in Western Inwinóre (Faëry), whence the Solosimpeli have danced along the beaches of the world. Upon this rock was the white town built called Kor, whence the fairies came to teach men song and holiness.’ In other words, Eldamar is the ‘fairy sand’ of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’. The ‘rampart-crowned’ city, superhuman in scale, cannot, however, be the work of fairies like J. M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell. Barrie and his Victorian predecessors were no more than a starting point for Tolkien, as Haggard had been. These are fairies prone to dancing on beaches, yet not only capable of building enduring monuments but also laden with a spiritual mission. They span the great divide between innocence and responsibility.

But why is Kôr ‘a City Lost and Dead’ in the poem? The answer appears in notes Tolkien added to his little prose outline about Éarendel’s Atlantic voyagings, an outline that clearly preceded Tolkien’s great Adamic works of name-giving. It had referred to a ‘golden city’ somewhere at the back of the West Wind. Now he added: ‘The golden city was Kôr and [Eärendel] had caught the music of the Solosimpë, and returns to find it, only to find that the fairies have departed from Eldamar.’ Kôr, in other words, was left empty by the Elves when they ‘marched into the world’.

It is a melancholy glimmer of story that, some years later, would form a climactic part of Tolkien’s mythological epic. Perhaps the idea owed something to the fact that, in 1915, his familiar haunts were virtually emptied of his peers, who were heading across the sea to fight. If so, Tolkien’s vision encapsulated mythological reconstructions and contemporary observation in one multi-faceted symbol.

If these April poems were a sudden spring bloom, then the Qenya Lexicon was root, stock, and bough. It is impossible, and perhaps meaningless, to give exact dates of composition for the lexicon, which was a work in progress during much of 1915 and accrued new words in no discernible order. It was a painstaking and time-consuming labour, and must have been set aside as Schools drew near. On 10 May, though, Tolkien was still musing on his mythology and painted a picture entitled The Shores of Faëry showing the white town of Kôr on its black rock, framed by trees from which the Moon and Sun hang like fruit.

From this, Tolkien had to turn to less enticing work: the much-neglected preparation for the two Schools papers he would rather not have had to sit at all. There was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Henry IV; and other ‘modern’ literature such as the works of Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson, none of which suited his maverick taste.* His preparation for these papers was perfunctory and saw the future Oxford professor of English borrowing introductions to Dryden and Keats from the library, as well as primers in Shakespeare and poetry, as late as the eve of his first paper.

Anxiety about his examinations was dwarfed by the fear of what lay beyond. Writing from Penmaenmawr at the start of June, G. B. Smith reassured him that the war would be over in a matter of months now that Italy had thrown its weight behind Britain and France. Smith, who shared his friend’s interest in the language and myth of Wales and had requested he send out a Welsh grammar, added: ‘Don’t worry about Schools, and don’t worry yourself about coming here.’ Four weeks would be quite enough time to sort out a place for Tolkien in the same battalion.

On Thursday 10 June, Tolkien started his exams. Just eight men and seventeen women in the whole university were left to endure the anticlimactic flurry of summing up three years’ work on English language and literature (or slightly less in Tolkien’s case) in ten sittings. In the middle of the ordeal, Smith wrote saying that Colonel Stainforth, his commanding officer (or ‘CO’), seemed certain to find space in the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers for Tolkien if he would write requesting a place. Schools finished the next week and Tolkien’s undergraduate life was behind him. Now for enlistment, training, and war.

Smith had sent a note on ‘matters Martian’ – advice on what kit to buy together with a facetious lexicon explaining the application procedure. The most important entry in Smith’s Concise Military Dictionary ran: ‘Worry: The thing to be avoided. Keep perfectly calm, and everything will settle itself.’ The policy worked for GBS, who was now a lieutenant. From Brough Hall, near Catterick Bridge in Yorkshire, where the Salford Pals had moved on midsummer’s day, Smith sent the reassuring suggestion, ‘Do not be afraid to bring a book or two, and a few paints, but let them be portable.’ Smith was now only a few miles to the north of Rob Gilson and the Cambridgeshires, who had marched out of their home town to Lindrick Camp near Fountains Abbey on 19 June. Gilson’s letters had dried up, however, and he was probably unaware of their proximity.

Tolkien was at last catching up with his friends and getting into step with this world in motion, yielding to the pressures he had resisted for almost a year. Unsurprisingly, he wasted no time and, in his own words, ‘bolted’ into the army. On 28 June he applied at the Oxford recruiting office for a temporary officer’s commission ‘for the duration of the war’. Captain Whatley of the university OTC sponsored his application and a Royal Army Medical Corps officer pronounced him fit. The form pointed out that there were no guarantees of appointment to any particular unit, but noting Tolkien’s preference a military pen-pusher scrawled ‘19/Lancs Fusiliers’ in the top corner.

Tolkien packed up the ‘Johnner’, his digs in St John Street, and bade farewell to Oxford, perhaps forever. When the English School results were issued, on Friday 2 July, he knew that his commitment to philology had been vindicated and that if he survived the war he would be able to pursue his academic ambitions. Alongside two women and an American Yale scholar, he had achieved First Class Honours. On Saturday the results were published in The Times and the next day Smith sent congratulations on ‘one of the highest distinctions an Englishman can obtain’. He again urged Tolkien to write to Colonel Stainforth.

After some time with Edith in Warwick, Tolkien went to Birmingham, where he spent part of the next three weeks with his maternal aunt, May Incledon, and her husband Walter, in Barnt Green, just beyond the southern limits of Birmingham – a house he associated with childhood security and early language games with his cousins Marjorie and Mary. Travelling on foot and riding the bus between Edgbaston and Moseley, he was consumed one day in thoughts of his mythology and, in his Book of Ishness, he wrote out a poem on 8-9 July entitled ‘The Shores of Faëry’ opposite his May painting of the same name. It describes the setting of Kôr. Eärendel makes an appearance and, for the first time outside the Qenya lexicon, essential and permanent features of the legendarium are named: the Two Trees, the mountain of Taniquetil, and the land of Valinor.

East of the Moon

West of the Sun

There stands a lonely hill

Its feet are in the pale green Sea

Its towers are white & still

Beyond Taniquetil in Valinor

No stars come there but one alone

That hunted with the Moon

For there the Two Trees naked grow

That bear Night’s silver bloom;

That bear the globed fruit of Noon

In Valinor.

There are the Shores of Faery

With their moonlit pebbled Strand

Whose foam is silver music

On the opalescent floor

Beyond the great sea-shadows

On the margent of the Sand

That stretches on for ever

From the golden feet of Kôr

Beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor.

O West of the Sun, East of the Moon

Lies the Haven of the Star

The white tower of the Wanderer,

And the rock of Eglamar,

Where Vingelot is harboured

While Earendel looks afar

On the magic and the wonder

‘Tween here and Eglamar

Out, out beyond Taniquetil

In Valinor – afar.

‘The Shores of Faëry’ is pivotal. Tolkien intended to make it the first part of a ‘Lay of Eärendel’ that would fully integrate the mariner into his embryonic invented world. He noted on a later copy that this was the ‘first poem of my mythology’. The key step forward was that here Tolkien finally fused language and mythology in literary art: the fusion that was to become the wellspring and hallmark of his creative life.

‘It was just as the 1914 War burst on me,’ Tolkien wrote later, ‘that I made the discovery that “legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition.’ The discovery offered a new life for his creation: ‘So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing “legends” of the same “taste”.’

He had for years been unable to reconcile the scientific rigour he applied in the strictly linguistic aspects of philology with his taste for the otherworldly, the dragon-inhabited, and the sublime that appeared in ancient literatures. It was as an undergraduate, he later said, that ‘thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests – opposite poles of science and romance – but integrally related.’

The Kalevala had shown that myth-making could play a part in the revival of a language and a national culture, but it may be that there was a more immediate catalyst. During the Great War, a similar process took place on a vast scale, quite impromptu. For the first time in history, most soldiers were literate, but more than ever before they were kept in the dark. They made up for this with opinion and rumour, ranging from the prosaic to the fantastical: stories about a German corpserendering works, a crucified Canadian soldier, and the troglodytic wild men of No Man’s Land who, the story went, were deserters from both sides. First World War history is often concerned with assessing the truth and impact of the seemingly more plausible ‘myths’ that have arisen from it: the ‘lions led by donkeys’, or the ‘rape of Belgium’. From the outset there were also myths of supernatural intercession. Exhausted British troops in retreat from Mons had apparently seen an angel astride a white horse brandishing a flaming sword; or a troop of heavenly archers; or three angels in the sky. The ‘Angels of Mons’ had forbidden the German advance, it was said. The incident had originated as a piece of fiction, ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen, in which the English archers of Agincourt return to fight the advancing Germans of 1914; but it had quickly assumed the authority of fact. At the same time that the war produced myths, the vast outpouring of Great War letters, diaries, and poetry enriched the languages of Europe with new words, phrases, and even registers, subtly altering and defining the perceptions of national character that were so important to the patriotic effort. All this was a living example of the interrelationship between language and myth.

If the early conception of an undying land owes something to Peter Pan, as the child’s dream-world of ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’ seems to have done, Tolkien’s Valinor was less haphazard than Neverland, a version of Faërie that Barrie had filched audaciously from every popular children’s bedtime genre, with pirates and mermaids, Red Indians, crocodiles, and pixies. Yet Valinor was broader still in its embrace. Here the Elves lived side by side with the gods, and here mortal souls went after death to be judged and apportioned torment, twilit wandering, or Elysian joy.

The Qenya lexicon translates Valinor as ‘Asgard’, the ‘home of the gods’ where the Norsemen feasted after they had been slain in battle. Tolkien was undoubtedly developing the conceit that the Germanic Vikings modelled their mythical Asgard on the ‘true’ myth of Valinor. In place of the Norse Æsir, or gods, are the Valar.

In the same spirit, ‘The Shores of Faëry’ purports to show a glimpse of the truth behind a Germanic tradition as fragmentary and enigmatic as Éarendel’s. The mariner’s ship in ‘The Shores of Faëry’ is called Vingelot (or Wingelot, Wingilot), which the lexicon explains is the Qenya for ‘foamflower’. But Tolkien chose the name ‘to resemble and “explain” the name of Wade’s boat Guingelot’, as he later wrote. Wade, like Éarendel, crops up all over Germanic legend, as a hero associated with the sea, as the son of a king and a merwoman, and as the father of the hero Wayland or Völund. The name of his vessel would have been lost to history but for an annotation that a sixteenth-century antiquarian had made in his edition of Chaucer: ‘Concerning Wade and his boat Guingelot, as also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over.’ Tolkien, having read the tantalizing note, now aimed to recreate the ‘long and fabulous’ story. The great German linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (mentioning Wade in almost the same breath as Éarendel) had argued that Guingelot ought to be ascribed instead to Völund, who ‘timbered a boat out of the trunk of a tree, and sailed over seas’, and who ‘forged for himself a winged garment, and took his flight through the air’. Out of this tangle of names and associations, Tolkien had begun to construct a story of singular clarity.

On Sunday 11 July Christopher Wiseman wrote to Tolkien announcing that he was going to sea. In June he had seen a Royal Navy recruiting advertisement saying that mathematicians were wanted as instructors; now he would soon be off to Greenwich to learn basic navigation ‘and the meaning of those mysterious words port, and starboard’. Wiseman proclaimed himself thoroughly jealous of Tolkien’s First – he himself had only achieved the grade of senior optime, the equivalent of a second-class: ‘I am now the only one to have disgraced the TCBS,’ he said. ‘I have written begging for mercy…’

Behind the glib tone, Wiseman was seriously missing his friends. He wished they could get together for a whole fortnight for once. It was manifestly impossible. Smith had written to him repeatedly about an unwelcome sense of growing up. ‘I don’t know whether it is only the additional weight of his moustache, but I presume there must be something in it,’ Wiseman commented. He too felt that they were all being pitched into maturity, Gilson and Tolkien even faster than Smith and himself. ‘It seems to proceed by a realization of one’s minuteness and impotence,’ he mused disconsolately. ‘One begins to fail for the first time, and to see the driving power necessary to force one’s stamp on the world.’

When Wiseman’s letter came, Tolkien was freshly and painfully alive to this process of diminution. On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell him he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday. Kitchener’s latest recruit also received a printed calligraphic letter addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved J.R.R. Tolkien[,] Greeting,’ and signed by King George, confirming the appointment and outlining his duties of command and service. But Tolkien’s plans had gone awry. ‘You have been posted to the 13th Service Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers,’ the War Office letter announced.

When Smith heard, four days later, he wrote from Yorkshire, ‘I am simply bowled over by your horrible news.’ He blamed himself for not slowing Tolkien down in his headlong rush to enlist. Somewhat unconvincingly, he said the appointment might be a mistake, or short-term; but as things turned out he was right to guess that Tolkien would be in less danger in the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers than in the 19th.

Tolkien was not going to rendezvous with the 13th straight away. First he had to take an officers’ course in Bedford. He received the regulation £50 allowance for uniform and other kit. Smith had outlined his needs in his discourse on ‘matters Martian’: a canvas bed, pillow, sleeping-bag and blankets; a bath-and wash-stand, a steel shaving mirror and a soap-box; tent-pole hooks and perhaps a ground-sheet. All this would have to fit in a large canvas kit-bag. In addition he should equip himself with two or three pairs of boots and a pair of shoes; a decent watch; a Sam Browne belt, mackintosh, light haversack and waterbottle; and, most expensive of all, binoculars and prismatic compasses. ‘All else seems to me unnecessary,’ Smith had said. ‘My table and chairs I intend to be soap-boxes bought on the spot, also I mean to buy an honest tin bucket.’ Creature comforts, it was clear, were going to be few and far between.

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